Are high sample rates making your music sound worse?

@uberwaltz congrats on your new Ayon and your experience sounds about right upsampling can help some recordings and not others. As with all recordings the initial mastering/recording quality matters most.

My experience is that the worse recordings are improved more than the better recordings - which seems logical to me. As you say, a good recording is a  good recording, regardless. A poor recording of Band of Gold - Freda Payne - gets some sort of life in it, but no matter what, I find nothing can bring Ultravox to any life at all! Were their recordings known to be poor?

uberwaltz4,443 posts
Yes I have same impression. Tried many times to enjoy upsampling to dsd, but all flavour and air dried up and sounded very mechanical. On the basis that most of the time 192 worked for me best (sometimes 96 suprisingly) I took the view to fix at 192 and just enjoy as much as possible without always wondering ... what if I went down to 96!..
Exactly the view of my long term dealer, who's ears and opinion are usually spot on

@tatyana69

Thats a really poor analogy. Of course it won’t sound the same, as you are changing the physical environment, so you now are dealing with altered reflections/reverberations/echo. 
 

To paraphase, 'its the source material stoopid'. Even supposedly top mastering studios like Bernie Grundman still churn out crap sounding CD's, its a disgrace really.