Extract from a blog post on Supratek News

If anyone tells you that 16 bit 44.1Khz is as good as 24 bit 384Khz , well you can believe their outdated views or you can listen for yourself. But please don't do this half-cocked or half interested, the results of a fully performing CA system with good digital files is beyond belief, but it is not simple to get everything firing and working in unison to unleash the potential. You don't have to spend megabucks , but it is essential to look beyond what the mainstream is believing , do a little research, try a lot of different things, and most importantly believe your ears. You're better off spending an hour listening and tuning than 10 hours of reading opinions on the forums. There's too many people talking rather than doing, if someone can't give specific explanations of why they have their opinions , then the result of following their advice is at best, questionable. So the following should also been taken in context, it's my experience with my equipment and knowledge, but has given me an extraordinary increase in performance over the last few months.

I wouldn't consider any dac that doesn't work at 384Khz. Firstly it shows the designer has the expertise and knowledge to build something that is state of the art, future-proof and forward looking. Secondly the advantages of using state of the art software to upsample to 384Khz (and beyond) is now beyond doubt , even mp3 is considerably improved when upsampled to 384Khz by software. Upsampling, or oversampling in the dac (hardware) is a completely different process and imo has no real advantage. Software programs which can accomplish this are JRiver, XXX High End, PureMusic and Audirvana Plus.
Spdif is outdated and incapable of getting the best from digital.

I'm presently using two dac systems: the EXA U2I which is a usb-I2s convertor, matched with an Ackodac board with internal 32 bit/384Khz Sabre dac chip www.exadevices.com and the EXA E18 dac which takes usb from computer and passes an I2S signal to the same 32 bit/384Khz capable ESS Sabre dac chip . www.exasound.com

Beware of I2S implementations- it is unquestionably the best way to pass a digital signal to a dac's input, but also very difficult to implement properly- there are many more bad I2S implementations than good .

The EXA E18 is an 8 channel dac which opens up the very exciting prospect of active crossovers in the digital domain- a very exciting direction.

Posted by Supratek