Phantom Gold doesn't support 192/24, surprising answer from support??

[rsemedo]

@rsemedo You have been ripped off mate but not by Devialet. here's no musical information above red book so whoever sold you the 24/192 probably told you a lot of lies. They all do.
Here is an email I received from Dr AIX, one of the very few gentleman who records in real high res and admits there's no discernible difference between high res and red book for the consumer.

Hi-Res Matters ... and It Doesn't
The results of my survey will be hard or impossible for many to accept. Those with a financial stake or vested interest in "hi-res" audio will continue to perpetuate the myth. I've had a few polite back and forth exchanges with David Solomon, the evangelist for Qobuz, on one of the FB audio groups that focuses on high-resolution audio. His contention — and one that I completely agree with — is that using high-resolution audio to produce new recordings makes a difference. He bolsters his position with "testimonials" from respected audio engineers and producers including Grammy-winning Bill Schnee and Cookie Marenco. Their arguments are well-founded and true but they do not conflict with the findings of my survey. How can hi-res audio absolutely make a difference and according to my own survey be indistinguishable from standard-res audio?

Because we're not talking about the same thing. David and his group are focused on one end of the production chain and I'm dealing with the other end. Making a recording requires a lot of individual steps. There's time spent in the studio or at a live venue capturing performances through microphones, preamps, and preserving them on recording devices — analog or digital. Additional vocal or instrumental parts are then layered on to the "basic tracks" over the course of weeks or even months. And finally, the individual tracks are blended, tweaked, and balanced into a surround or stereo mix – called the mixdown stage. At the end of the process, a mastering engineer assembles the album, applies EQ and compression, and adds the metadata to the final files prior to replication or distribution. All of this should ideally happen in high-resolution. Why?

Because one of the primary goals of the audio engineers working on the project is to record the instruments and vocals in the best quality possible. You can always make a recording with lots of fidelity sound worse but you can't go the other way. When the artist is singing or playing a new part, the engineer can only guess at how loud the artist will sing or play. Having 24-bits affords recording engineers additional "headroom" before excessively loud moments overload some part of the signal path, distort and sound terrible. Using 24-bits provides over 120 dB of potential signal to noise specifications. Increasing the sampling rate helps with filtering and analog to digital conversion. Moving to high-resolution during the production phases of a commercial recording project makes all the sense in the world.

But engineering a new album project in a professional recording studio is very different than playing back a final mastered, released track in your own home on your own system. As the HD-Audio Challenge II clearly demonstrated, playing back music in "hi-res" audio — with sample rates higher than 44.1 kHz and word lengths longer than 16-bits — doesn't provide any perceptible fidelity improvement over using Red Book standards. The industry will continue to try and defend "hi-res" audio and market ever higher specifications because they want us to purchase new "hi-res" equipment, subscribe to pricier music services, and buy our favorite music all over again. But signing up for the highest tier of Spotify or buying Blu-ray music discs won't make any difference in your music enjoyment.

If I were an evangelist for a "hi-res" streaming service or the head of marketing for a digital music download site (wait a minute I am responsible for iTrax.com, the first high-resolution music download site ), I would have a hard time acknowledging and accepting the results of the HD-Audio Challenge II survey. As someone that has championed hi-res audio for over a decade, the results directly contradict many of the articles on this site. But I didn't manipulate the data to conform to my previous position of advocating for hi-res audio. I wanted to know if real world audiophiles could hear the "dramatic" improvement in fidelity claimed by NARAS, the DEG, CTA/CEA, music services, and the music labels. I'm satisfied that hi-res doesn't matter as a final delivery format. However, it does matter while Bill Schnee, Cookie Marenco. or I are making new recordings. We can all be right. And audiophiles should understand the facts.

So down sample your 24/192 to red book and enjoy the music.

You are absolutely right. Here is an audio test made by the french newspaper Le Monde : they ask 2 professional musicians and a well known recording engineer  to compare redbook and high res versions of the same files using a  high end highres players and a Senheiser headphone, and none of them is reliably able to tell which is the high res version and which is the downsampled redbook version.  

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/20...08996.html

So Devialet did the right thing by marketing the Phantom's DAC has 24/192k and now, the exact same product, is 24/48...??? Devialet didn't ripped me off?!? Because independent of what each of us can hear or not there's a market that appreciates HiRes up to 24/192+ and it's ready to pay for it...and Devialet at the start of their life market their product has 24/192 not 24/48...I wonder why?? 🙄