Using DirectSound SSRC Plugin, I have many questions. Options

[ViPER1313]

As the owner of a SB-Live card, I want to improve the quality of my sound playback. I have Peter's DirectSound SSRC v2.2.6 plugin installed with Winamp v2.81. For audio playback, I use a Kenwood 5.1 S.S. Reciever conected to the SPDIF port on the SB-Live (Digital throughput). The amp supports 96khz / 24bit decoding in hardware (and it does it quite well from what I can see, more on that later..) My questions reside on the settings for using all my plugins in conjunction.

Q1) Where should dithering be applied. For example, the vorbis decoder plugin supports dithering of 8/16/24 bit files, while the DS SSRC plugin also supports dithering of 8/16/24bit. Should I enable dithering in all the separate plugins and disable in the the DS SSRC plugin, or disable it in all input plugins (Vorbis, MPC, AAC) and enable it solely in the DS SSRC output plugin. Or should I enable it in both input / output (double dither???)

Q2) Should the input plugins for Vorbis / MPC / AAC be set to 24bit or 16 bit output. If they are set to 24bit, does dither need to be selected on the input side?? (goes along with question 1...) For reference, all files used are in 44100 /16 bit format. Is it higher quality to set all the input plugins to 16bit and the output to 24 bit / 96000 khz, or is it better to select 24bit on all the input plugins and 16bit / 48000 khz in the DS SSRC output plugin?

Q3) If 24 bit is used on the input plugins as well as 24 bit / 96000 on the output plugin, do you need to use dithering at all?

Q4) Is noise shaping a good or bad thing? Should it be enabled in the output plugin?

Q5) What is noise distribution?? The three options for this setting are rectangular, triangular and gaussian. Which of these three settings offers the highest quality.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

For reference, I have some screenshots of sweep.wav provided below. These are taken by playing the sweep.wav file through my Kenwood Receiver’s headphone jack and recording the sound on a second machine using a SB-16 ISA card @ 44.1 / 16bit. Sweep.wav is a 44.1khz / 16bit file.

Input Plugin Settings (Waveform Decoder v2.05a) / Output Plugin Settings
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. 16 bit output / dither -||- No Resample using WaveOut (Pic1)
2. 16 bit output / dither -||- Resample 48/16bit || Dither w/o noise shaping (Pic2)
3. 16 bit output / dither -||- Resample 96/24bit || Dither w/o noise shaping (Pic3)

(If links don't work, try "Open in New Window" or "Save target As" and open them locally. I've had probs with Angelfire in the past...)

Edit - Small errors....

This post has been edited by ViPER1313: Feb 7 2003, 08:22