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If upsampled is fake, then original is at least half-faked

"your 24/96 DAC gets you a fake sound from a 16/44 CDs, period!

The numbers on a CD can be plotted as points on grid paper. If you do that accurately you will have all of the information on the CD. To turn it into an electrical signal that you can amplify and send to your speakers there are certain things that need to be done, and the main one that is germane to this discussion is to turn the dots into a continuous curve.

If you think this process is fake, so be it. But don't waste you time posting on any forum that involves digital music. Stick strictly to analog!

All that upsampling does is to draw a smooth curve through the original 44/16 points and turn it into a bunch of new points on a finer grid. And then these points need to be turned into a (hopefully similar) smooth curve and amplified. So yes, there may be twice as much "fakery" involved if this is what you want to call it. But if upsampled digital audio is fake then the original digital audio is at least half-faked.(Another word unavoidably comes to mind.) Even a NOS DAC is involved with the same "fakery": it turns dots into a staircase waveform instead of a smooth curve. Some people may prefer this, but it's not the waveform that was originally recorded by the ADC.

You will will better results upsampling 44.1 if you go to 88.2, 176.4, 352.8, etc., assuming that your DAC runs at multiples of 44.1, by the way.
(This may not be theoretically true, but it is certainly true in practice with all the SRCs that I've tested or seen tested.) Or you may get better results feeding your DAC with the original 44/16 material. It depends on the DAC and the upsampler and how good a job they do "connecting the dots".

Of course, if someone upsamples a 44/16 recording to 96/24 and then sells it as a 96/24 hi-res recording they are committing fraud. In most cases, such frauds can be easily detected by forensic analysis using ordinary audio editing software such as Sony SoundForge.






Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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