In Reply to: RE: foobar 24/88.2 flac need help posted by kuramura on December 1, 2011 at 19:55:07:
No sample rate converter is perfect, there are tradeoffs involved. Some come from limitations of the compute power and/or knowledge of DSP design and programming, but others are inescapable and come from mathematics. This is particularly problematical at the lower sampling rates. In addition, although theory says that conversion from mixed rates such as 88.2 to 96 ought to be no worse than even rates, this does not prove out in practice, possibly because the computation required is significantly more complex and therefore there are more ways to do things poorly.
When you upsample you do filtering in the computer, in effect replacing the DAC's filter with the computer's filter. In general these will be different and so the sound will be (somewhat) affected. Whether one way is better than another depends on the filters involved, i.e. there can be no general rule. Pragmatically, it is often the case that upsampling improves a cheap DAC, but it is less likely that upsampling will improve a great DAC and it may make things worse. Hence, YMMV.
Even more annoying, given a choice of filters the best sounding filter may depend on the record being played, taking us back to the days of LP playback prior to the RIAA curve.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Follow Ups
- RE: foobar 24/88.2 flac need help - Tony Lauck 07:33:40 12/02/11 (1)
- RE: foobar 24/88.2 flac need help - Archimago 10:28:51 12/02/11 (0)