Monica DAC at 24/96?

[zacster]

I bought an assembled Monica DAC, from member Peter Menting a few months ago. I always thought that the TDA 1541 that's inside it was a 16/44.1 dac, but when I played a 24/96 recording through it tonight I was blown away when it synced up and played.

Am I getting true 24 bit decoding, or am I reading the data sheet correctly and it only reads the 16 most significant bits and ignores the rest? And is it really capable of 96000 samples/sec?

I've only had the unit for a few months now, and was already beginning to think about trading out the Monica for a true 24/96 DAC and keeping the tube output stage. It sounds great for CD the way it is but I've been recording my LPs at the higher rate, mostly just to see if I could do it, which I can. I burn it to DVD as a PCM audio layer , NOT as DVD-A. With DVD-A being dead, I don't understand why DVD-A existed in the first place. Why didn't they just produce stereo 24/96 PCM DVDs which can play on ANY DVD player?