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DSD 64 conversion to flac

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huang_wan:
I did some searching in case someone else needed to know (hope it helps someone):

There are several ways to describe the precision used for measuring the height of the sound wave.
One common unit in digital audio, and the unit used inside Media Center, is bits. This is where the name bitdepth comes from.
Bitdepth describes the number of 0's or 1's (computers are binary) used for each height measurement of the sound wave.
It is recommended to output to your soundcard or DAC using the highest bitdepth that the hardware supports. This is 24bit for most high-end DACs.
If you play 16bit input, you might feel inclined to output 16bit data even though your DAC is 24bit. This will at best sound the same as outputting 24bit. But it has two important drawbacks:
   Transitioning between 16-bit and 24-bit source material will require reopening the audio hardware (so make gapless transitions impossible)
   If you apply any digital processing, including volume, the sound quality will be worse
24-bit padded means that 24-bit audio is being sent inside a 32-bit container. This is very common over HDMI connections, as they typically do not accept a "plain" 24-bit signal.

Awesome Donkey:
Yeah, I don't mess with bit-depth usually. In fact, I usually just max it out in MC and let it handle that. AFAIK, increasing bit-depth (e.g from 16-bit to 24-bit/32-bit or 24-bit to 32-bit) is just a matter of padding it with zeros on-the-fly, it doesn't invoke a resample like changing the sample rate does (so it's still bit-perfect output). However, changing from 24-bit/32-bit to 16-bit likely would require dithering.

Hendrik:
Changing the bitdepth never requires resampling. Increasing it is lossless, as its just adding padding (ie. 1234.00 and 1234.0000 are the same value, just more precision, even if unused), reducing it reduces precision of course, but always properly dithered.

dtc:
By indicating a conversion for >768KHz, you are basically telling MC to convert DSD to PCM. However, the value you put there is ignored. The DSD conversion is always done  by  a factor of 8. So, DSD64 (2.8 MHz) converts to 352 KHz and  DSD 128 (5.6 MHz) converts to 705 KHz. If your DAC does not support 352 KHz or 705 KHz you then need to do an additional PCM conversion to the final sample rate, e.g. 176 KHz. So, you have to put that conversion in the 352 and 705 lines. Integer conversions are more efficient than non-integer conversions, so 352/705 KHz are usually converted to 176 KHz and 384/768 KHz are usually converted to 192 KHz for a DAC that handles up to 192 KHz.

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