Can an onboard optical connection(realtek 850, 48 khz only) + a (perhaps not perfect) resampler make my music sound brighter compared to my dvd player (connected digitally(coaxial) to the same reciever). I do occasionally hear (what i think are) resampling articfacts, but sometimes i think that listening to my dvd player, the sound is less bright and has a better bass. I intend to buy an envy24 card in the near future, so this is out of curiosity.

Reciever: Yamaha RX-V430RDS
DVD Player: Cyberhome CH-DVD 505
Headphones: Beyerdynamic DT-831
Soundcard/chip: Realtek ALC-850
OS: Gentoo 2005.1 (linux distribution) with alsa 1.0.10

I know my headphones are bright by nature, but with my dvd player i rarely dislike them, but with my computer i do more often.

Are these constant resampling artifacts or is this jitter or something else? (i don't know what jitter or other artifacts sound like, i do hear when artifacts are really audible, but even then i can't give them a name)

Madman2003.

If the resampling was mathematically sound enough it would not produce any such artifact but with hardware resampling just about anything is possible.

It's not a hardware resampler, but from what i can gather not an extremely good resampler. Alsa mailinglists have some clues that the resampler is far from perfect. Cpu usage seem to support that. 5-7% cpu usage for decoding flac and resampling @1000Mhz is not a lot.

I tried using foobar2000 trough wine. Although not fluent under load, the resampler on that is better. (it's definately less bright, but i can't be a 100% sure it's only the resampler, could be some other foobar related thing too, there is as always a small chance that it's a placebo effect) I've ordered myself an envy24 card, so i shouldn't have to worry about resamplers in the near future. One thing that is definately not placebo, is the fact that only the foobar resampler passes the udail test.