Upsampling

[Mike Rubin]

I have been purchasing hi-res tracks from sites on the web and, of course, have seen that, at some of the sites, the price goes up as the resolution increases.  I always have assumed that the pricing is intended to exploit the consumer's expectation that higher resolution equates with better sound, but I suppose it's possible that there's more work in bringing the higher res files to market.

 

I recently realized that my dbPowerAmp Converter can upsample all the way up to 384khz just by my pressing a button.  

 

So that begs the question of whether the hi-res sellers are doing something substantial to create these variously-priced versions of the same titles or just running the same sources through upsampling software like I can do at my home computer.  I am not so cynical as to assume the worst, but am genuinely curious about how commercial hi-res files are created.  What do the sellers do that we can't do at home with a CD quality source and upsampling software?

[Mike Rubin]

Thank you very much.  That's exactly what I was seeking. 

 

I couldn't agree more that the original source is the primary determinant of sound quality, but I do hear differences between the same files when resolution increases.  Often, however, that seems most affected by volume level differences between the two versions under comparison.  Are those differences improvements?  I can't tell without doing more analytical listening, really, and it is too much work to try to live on the differences that seem apparent on casual listening. 

 

It probably is a topic for another day, but I have had consistently good sound from DSD files.  Part of that is self-fulfilling, because I tend to buy in DSD format stuff that I already own that has decent sound, but newer native DSD files routinely have sounded great.  However, they tend to present pedestrian music by unknown artists and I wouldn't want too steady a diet of that stuff for listening rather than system evaluation.