Doubt about music format

[Edu28]

Hello everyone, I'm a novice in this music conversion because before I had an Ipod that as we all know has been obsolete, buy a FiiO XI II and I'm trying to get the highest possible sound quality my question is about the formats I have in AAC at 320 bps and 44100 HZ I passed them to Flac 24 bits since 192 bsp is the standard of these files but I do not know how to put them if 48000 or more the headphones are Audio -AT m50x technics ¿what do you recommend?

[timster67]

Re: Doubt about music format

As has been explained in your other thread, the "highest possible sound quality" for a 320kbps AAC file is.. a 320kbps AAC file. The 320kbps is the way lossy compression rates work, it's a bit rate calculation that can be constant or variable. 44.1KHz on the other hand is the sampling rate of the digitisation.

AAC/MP3 etc. are lossy compression formats. This means the original 44.1k samples are compressed into smaller and smaller bits and information is lost along the way. This information can never be recovered.

Lossless formats, such as flac or WAV, can store the samples in 16 or 24 bits (the bit depth). The higher the number, the more information (hence 24 is usually referred to as HiRes). The original masters have 24-bits. If you rip a CD though, this is only ever 16 bits. Ripping to 24 bits will only pad it out with zeros.
These formats can also support higher sampling rates than the 44.1kHz standard, such as 48kHz, 96kHz or 192kHz. The bit rates for these (forgetting compression in flacs) would be sample rate*bit depth*number of channels (2, as it's stereo). So lossless flac 44.1/16 bit rate is 1.4112Mbps. Considerably higher than 320kbps!

You can't make anything that has been losslessly compressed into higher sound quality by converting back to flac. There is literally no point.