Pro Audio Support

Q:
I was looking at the specs for the 192, and noticed that the frequency response is listed at 20Hz-20kHz. Now, this may be a stupid question, but shouldn't the frequency response be much higher than that, now that it can run at 192 kHz?
 
A:
The spec we provide is for Frequency Response Deviation. According to AES-17, you pick an upper and lower band edge frequency (in our case 20Hz and 20kHz respectively) and then measure the amplitude deviation within that band. AES-17 further requires the same band edge be used for all sample rates.The actual -3dB point of the product is greater than 20kHz, though. The high-frequency cutoff scales with sample rate; the -3dB point is determined by the digital interpolation filters, and is equal to about half the sample rate. There is an additional slow rolloff on the DAC side above 200kHz so that the noise-shaped image energy doesn't affect downstream systems. That rolloff, cascaded with the digital band-edge filters give a -1dB response at 80kHz with a 192kHz sample rate. This filter has little effect at 48k and 96k sample rates.About noise, one must always specify the measurement bandwidth when giving noise figures. AES-17 specifies that the upper noise band edge be 20kHz at all sample rates greater than 40kHz. Using that measurement standard, the noise bandwidth does not scale with sample rate.]