Quote Originally Posted by phileserver39
Good Evening folks,

I have a sound card whose bit rate and sample rate can be manually adjusted from 16 to 24 and from 44.1 to 192 khz respectively. My question is this: does it effect sound quality if I keep it on 24/ 192 no matter what the source material? Keeping it "maxed" is easier since I sometimes play some music files which are at 24/192 however, mostly I play redbook quality material.

I understand that the dac "fills in zeros" when lacking info. I just don't know if this is a detriment when playing redbook flac files.

Thanks in advance for your time and expertise!

Best,

Jason
Read you s/c's manual to determine exactly what it does when you set a higher bit/sample freq than the music file.

Most likely, as Poppa suggests, it will upsample it a lower bit rate. On the other hand, possibly it just passes the lower bit rate unaltered -- and/or if you set, say,16/44.1 that it will downsample 24/192 to that the lower rate, which you wouldn't want.

Upsampling can be a good thing depending on the implementation. Upsampled sound can be high-frequency-filtered without the phase shifts caused by filtering 44.1; (the same thing can be accomplished by oversampling -- see Poppa's reference). However upsampling does something else too: it forces re-clocking which can reduce jitter which can improve the sound -- or it might introduce more artifacts that make the final result worse overall. Most current DACs incorporate oversampling on-chip, and many today incorporate upsampling on-chip; either way on-chip processing is unlikey to introduce addition jitter.