Converting Flac to Wav & Upconversion

Hi Mezmo,
I guess I confused you as much as I was confused. I wasn't trying at all to articulate why it would be better, but simply find out if it could be. My experience mirrors yours. Usually I prefer Native resolution playing files, but there were a few that I prefered up converted...as you, in multiples of 2. I did have some 16/44 that was a tad smoother and seemed to be a tad faster when upconverting to 24/176, but normally, I found native to be ever so slightly harmonically richer... That was upconverting a file through the DAC. Last night, I actually changed a file resolution. Well, my observation... Converting Flac to WAV, on normal to very good recordings, I found the WAV file to improve over Flac, a touch more focus and a touch tighter bass, no loss of detail. On High quality recordings???not so much, had a hard time telling them apart, sometimes felt like I could, but most likely me just thinking my old ears still have it, most likely no difference. Thats were it stands as of now, but I've only listened about an hour and a half. Again, this started because I respect Steve N's opinion and have seen in a couple of threads say that he recommended converting FLAC... I just happened across the upconversion. I'm going to try 24/44.1 next.

FLAC to .wav conversion is one thing, but sample-rate conversion is another. dbpoweramp is great for ripping and format conversions, however it is probably a mediocre resampler at best. Use Izotope for this. It's the best.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Thanks, Tim. Was hopeful that perhaps you'd stumbled on something cool, but sounds like we're pretty much on the same page after all: curious, but the jury's still out.

Steve, have you found that permanently up-sampling files with a purpose-built program (ie, Izotope) is beneficial? As they say in the old Starship Troopers campy romp: Would you like to learn more? Yes. Many thanks.

Haven't really compared FLAC or ALAC to AIFF or WAV but it makes sense to me that uncompressed would be theoretically capable of higher fidelity - no need for the CPU or software to convert on the fly. Storage space is extremely cheap, especially compared to overall hifi costs - so my attitude is why bother with compression at all.

Up conversion, however, makes no sense to me whatsoever. IMO, anything which alters the original signal is distortion.

Mezmo wrote:
"Steve, have you found that permanently up-sampling files with a purpose-built program (ie, Izotope) is beneficial?"

Depends on your DAC. With most DACs, this type of upsampling from 44.1 to 96 can be very beneficial. More detail and improved dynamics. Smoother vocals.

The problem I have found with FLAC is that on many systems it compresses the sound a bit. I believe that it is not changing the data when run statically, but dynamically something is happening to corrupt the data. With cheap disk prices and AIFF format, there is really no reason to play FLAC files. Convert them to AIFF or .wav.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio