Downsampling audio ?
August 8th, 2016
If you were to downsample a FLAC file to, say a 320kHz mp3, would the quality be better than a normal 320kHz ?
e.g., you know how a dvdrip of 700mb won’t look as good as a blu ray rip at 700mb (because of source material etc)…
Well, I would assume that 320kbps (which is what I think you are talking about, and not the frequency range) is created from downsampling loseless files. But like movies, even though they might be converted from the same video file and end up the same size, because the encoding settings were different, they could have a HUGE difference in terms of end quality. Using audio files for example, even something like using a constant bitrate versus average bitrate or variable bitrate, could have (small) differences in audio quality. That is of course, excluding other factors such as frequency, encoding speed, mp3 encoder, etc… can also have differing effects.
Alas, the differences however, between two true 320kbps files, are probably negligible unless you have some nice audio equipment (in which case, you should probably be listening to loseless files any ways), so it doesn’t really matter.
I’m about to get some nice audio equipment, entry level Denon, but it can only play mp3 and wma files.
I’m pretty sure .wma can be loseless, so you could just use that instead.
But then again, even with expensive audio equipment, it can be hard to distinguish between 320kbps from loseless flacs, and there’s even speculation that the difference is inaudible. So bottom line, it doesn’t really matter, cause the effort you might put in may not even result in any noticeable gains.
Hmm. Ok, thanks!