VinylStudio and the PS Audio NPC. What's really happening with the bit depth?

[JoeK]

Hi,

I have a PS Audio NPC and am having difficulties understanding a couple of things.  With respect to bit depth, I have the NPC outputting at 96/24.  The computer I am using, a Sony VAIO laptop with Windows 7 x64 shows the recording input for the NPC connected via USB as "Line 2-PS Audio NuWave Phono" and the default format in advanced properties for this device is set to "2 channel, 24-bit, 9600 Hz (Studio Quality).  Both check boxes in "Exclusive Mode" are checked. 

In the "Check Level" dialog in Vinyl Studio, I see the bit level for all sample rates through 192 kHz says "up to 16 bits" per sample.  I am not currently using WASAPI but it makes no difference in the bit depth with this either on or off.  Changing the input device to "ASIO" doesn't change the bit depth either but there is no indication of bit-depth (blank fields) when I check the sample rate.

When recording, VS indicates 96/24 recording is taking place.  When I save the tracks, the properties of these tracks show 96/24.

Why doesn't vinyl studio show that 24 bits is supported by my recording device?  Are the tracks being down sampled from 24 to 16 bits?  Is this a hardware limitation of the "sound card" (Realtek High Definition Audio) in the Sony PC?

Thanks in advance for helping me to understand this a bit better.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

Yes, this is a bit confusing.  The available bit depth reported by VinylStudio refers to recording via WASAPI.  For reasons we don't fully understand, Windows sometimes limits this to 16 bits even when the hardware supports 24.

Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this.  You can either:

• uncheck 'Use WASAPI for Recording' in VinylStudio's Check Level dialog and set Windows' Shared Recording format correctly (as you have done), or:
• use ASIO

Either of these approaches will give 'true' 24 bit recording.

There is an entry in the VinylStudio Help File about this, but it's perhaps a bit hard to find.

[JoeK]

Thanks Paul.  I appreciate the quick response!

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Update (very late in the day!)  This was our bug.  Recent versions of VinylStudio now report the bit depth correctly and record at 24 bits.

[JoeK]

It's all good Paul!  Thanks for the update!

Joe