I have owned some high sampling rate music for quite a long time. Whenever I played those audio file on my MacBook, I know that they were played with the correct sampling rate because such settings can be configured using an App. However, when I’m in the office, though I do have an external DAC, but since the device itself is not showing the sampling rate and bit depth, I have no idea what sampling specifications I’m listening to.
Check the sampling spec
But actually to check the sampling specifications, you just need to play an audio file and type:
pacmd list-sinks
And look for something like this:
sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz
Configure pulseaudio
Normally, you can the the configuration file at /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.
To change the bit depth, first look for
; default-sample-format = s16le
Uncomment this by removing the semicolon and change to:
default-sample-format = s24le
And to allow a variable sampling rate during playback instead of a fixed value, such as 44100 or 48000, just look for
; avoid-resampling = false
And change to:
avoid-resampling = yes
Finally, restart the pulseaudio daemon by:
pulseaudio --kill
pulseaudio --start
And you can check whether those settings are correctly loaded by:
pulseaudio --dump-conf