I've been playing around with the Sooloos and adapting to its interface and sound. The upsampling option has been causing some paranoia as I prefer the presentation of 16/44 CD files without the upsampling selected.

However, I understand that technically this is less favourable at the SPDIF output. Fellow HH's have suggested the ID40 / 808.3 route to a higher quality but I'm loathed to pay for something that I wouldn't use (the CD and analogue pre)

So... I started reading. To quote from a post on Computer Audiophile by Steve from Empirical Audio:

"The difference is the upsampling algorithms. When hardware is designed to upsample audio streams on the fly, there have to be compromises in order to fit the logic in the chip and do the upsampling in real-time. There is also the issue of talent of the designer in selecting the best algorithms, filtering and dithering.

Software upsamplers on the other hand have no real time constraints or hardware fit constraints, so the designers can use more complicated algorithms that cannot currently run real-time. These can be more accurate and get closer to the ideal hi-res master.

Having used a number of upsamplers and modded more than a dozen DACs in the last 10 years, I have concluded that there are no really good hardware upsamplers, and the software upsamplers that are world-class you can count on one hand. Even with these, the settings for pre-ring and other options are critical to getting a good result."

One of the computer software packages that comes very highly recommended is Wave Editor from Audiofile Engineering. Unfortunately it's only available on the Mac... (hence a MAC MINI in the post as we speak...)

I was considering the Weiss Saracon package until I discovered that it looses all the metadata on conversion which all has to be manually re-entered... (yes, my thoughts too!!)

My intention is to dither/upsample my "chill out" tracks and thus avoid the unfavourable environment inside the Control 15. Of the stored albums I have there are 30 or so that I listen to intensely so I intend to start with these. Others for the Mrs and the kids (Now that's what I call music etc) can stay as 16/44 tracks to save hard drive space and my sanity.

One day if Meridian allow the Sooloos to output at 24/192 then I'll have the tracks to do again, but hopefully by then they'll be economically viable 2TB 2.5" SATA hard drives to retrofit to the Control 15... and pigs might fly!!

Has anyone else gone down this route, or got experience of the Wave software with preferred settings I'd be very interested...

PS No cats will be harmed in the dithering process...