BSS BLU 48khz vs. 96khz

Hi,

I have a home theater using a BSS BLU160 for speaker presets (M2), room EQ, bass management and basically everything except surround decoding. I am preparing my design for adding more speakers going from 7.1.4 to 9.1.6 and running into challenges with available CPU-power.

One way to free up more power is to run the BSS at 48khz instead of 96khz. What are you experiences? Is there an audible difference or am I just chasing my tail here? I only use the system for movies so all content is 48khz natively.

Unfortunately my processer does not output digitally, so the BSS is connected with analog in => analog out resulting in an extra AD/DA conversion. Will 48khz only affect the AD/DA conversion or will it also affect the actual processing precision in the digital domain?

Based upon the differences in CPU power, you necessarily will be losing resolution for the calculations, but as you say, most movies are 48kHz anyway (except perhaps concert Blu-rays).

The new Synthesis SDP-55 has Dante so you could potentially run a hybrid Blu link and Dante setup. Problem is that the firmware for the SDP-55 is still reportedly pretty buggy.

I have looked at lot at the SDP-55 due to this. (And this raise another question: The SDP-55 Dante outputs at 48khz. Would it then be best to set the BSS at 48khz to match the digital input and not do any re-sampling of the signal?).

But I have the same intuition about twice as many data points should result in better A/D and D/A and filter processing. But I am no expert in signal processing so not sure you can see it that way.