Chord has a special sauce, Shiit has a special sauce, Ayre has one too. Oversampling and filters are at the heart of all modern DACs for basic legitimate reasons. You should make it clear that what you call best is your subjective opinion. Get yourself an OPPO blu ray player and some multi-channel SACD's and hear for yourself. On the other hand, 'multi-channel' recorded and delivered at 24/96 is a different story. Also, I think is the 'stereo' realm all up and down conversion, bit perfect stuff is largely gobbledygook. This is my experience so far and, the only conclusion is this: since I can not distinguish 24/96 downloads as sounding better than 256k at 44, I see no reason to buy hi-res downloads unless the downloads were originally mastered at 24/96, for which there is some compelling evidence for better sound. I get the feeling this does sound better than the way I've arranged thing with the other laptop but, what I perceive as better in all reality is likely just a higher volume. This USB to S/PDIF sound card will convert all sample rates my files may be stored to 24/96. My other laptop runs ITunes also but, with this computer, I use an external sound card to output to HT pre/pro. In other words, I suspect I could start buying 24/192 downloads, and with a new DAC I could convert those hi- res files, but would not hear better than what I hear now. I even have a few AIFF files at 24/192 and they sound great too. But, the fact is anything downloaded at over 16/44 can not be discerned as being better in any manner that better could be defined.

The sound/music from my iTunes library sounds awesome, whether downloaded there as an AAC file, ALAC at ether 16/44 or 24/96.

I do not see any reason to set my laptop to 24/192.but, nevertheless,I've set iTunes to output up to 24/192. Now, since Airport Express only outputs at 16/44. I have two laptops, one is connected to my HT pre/pro, which decodes at 24/96, via Wi-Fi from computer to Airport Express connected to the pre/pro using S/PDIF output from Airport Express.

Offline resampler as good as hqplayer