In reply to:
You are right that the Sony does not have 192/24-bit DAC's. The thing is I am not completely sure what that means! If you can fill me on what that means I would appreciate it.
It's a sampling rate. Digitizing an analog sound wave is usually done by grabbing points along the sound wave at recurring intervals. CD's do this at 44.1Hz. DVD-A multichannel does it at 96Hz. DVD-A stereo can do this at 192Hz. This basically means the encoder is taking 192 samples of the sound wave per second. The more samples, the closer to the original analog signal is possible. 24-bit precision refers to how accurate the individual sample is encoded. At 16-bit, traditional CD quality, you have 16 ones and zeros to represent the data point samples by the encoder. The larger the number, the closer to the actual value you can get.
All this boils down to is that 24/192 is more precise than 24/96 or 16/44.1. Of course, I'm pretty skeptical that people can hear that level of precision, but I haven't had the pleasure myself.
