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Thread: Does up-res'ing really improve the sound if the source is mp3 or AAC?

  1. #1

    Join Date
    Jan 2020
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    LA, CA
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    Does up-res'ing really improve the sound if the source is mp3 or AAC?

    If my source file is of a lower quality, even though it's digital ...

    I'm definitely new around here, and I've immersed myself into the world of digital audio. After 25 years of excellent service, I retired my old hifi and bought into the integrated-amp-plus-streamer world of relatively (really relatively compared to what's out there} low cost high-end audio. And, because of that, I want to make sure I am streaming the best possible sources of my 200gb+ collection. As I've been ripping for years, many of the tracks are still encoded in mp3, though most are AAC. That's been fine in my car, my headphones, and on the cheap speakers plugged into my computer. I never ran digital sources through my analog hifi.

    But now that I have the capacity to stream FLAC, AIFF, and Apple Lossless, I came here to up-res my collection, which I've done.

    So my question is this: If I change a file from mp3 or ACC to m4a, FLAC, or AIFF, is there some way these higher-resolution files fills in information that may have been compressed out when originally recorded to those lesser quality formats?

    And a level deeper: When Tidal offers it's HiFi or MQA service (to which I subscribed), am I just streaming a higher resolution file of an inferior track?

    Lastly, and this exhausts my knowledge on the topic, can up-res'ing only truly work on those tracks that are remastered? Clearly, I'm not remastering the tracks in my collection, so what - other than uniformity - is the advantage of increasing the format quality of a then-standard-but-now-sub-standard source?






  2. #2
    dBpoweramp Enthusiast
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Posts
    133

    Re: Does up-res'ing really improve the sound if the source is mp3 or AAC?

    Quick answer: No.

    Long answer: No. Where would the extra data come from? If it was lost, there is no getting it back.

  3. #3
    dBpoweramp Guru
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Florida, USA
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    5,735

    Re: Does up-res'ing really improve the sound if the source is mp3 or AAC?

    As noted. NO. Upsampling doesn't do anything but make the file size larger. The actual audio is not changed.

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