Some commonsense

[audiobomber]

CD's 96dB, seems like it should be enough, yet my experience is that, all else being equal, more bits sounds better. DSD resolution is equivalent to 20 bits in PCM, but DSD recording sometimes imposes a softness that I don't like.

 

When first exploring computer audio, I downloaded a test that provided some familiar tunes, reproduced at 16/44, 24/48, 24/96 and 24/192. The biggest difference was between 16/44 and 24/48. Nevertheless, I believe the quality of the recording far outweighs the importance of 16 vs. 24 bits or sample rates beyond 44.1kHz.

 

I believe that oversampling or transcoding to a higher sample rate is beneficial, as it allows for a more gradual aliasing filter. I prefer to do this in exact multiples of the original signal to avoid interpolation. For 16/44, I use 176.4kHz (4X), or 5.6MHz DSD (128X). My Audiolab CD/DAC/preamp performs integer oversampling and upsamples up to 84.672MHz and 32 bits

[audiobomber]

27 minutes ago, mansr said:

PCM is lossless in the sense that it captures perfectly any signal within the well-defined bounds determined by sample rate and bit depth. This is in stark contrast to perceptual coding systems that discard a little bit here and a little bit there according to their psychoacoustic models of what is or isn't audible.

Yes, and hopefully this will put an end to the raging semantic argument.