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Can a DAC upscale high resolution music files?

Greetings,

First  time poster here so please be gentle.

I just entered the DAC world. I own two DACs an Oppo BDP 105, on my surround system, and a  Yamaha CD-S2100 for my stereo system in my kitchen.

I am jumping in first with the Yamaha DAC. I have already downloaded the Yamaha Steinberg USB driver onto my laptop and use a  Kimber USB-CU B-bus cable connecting the two. I went to HDTracks this morning and bought  Chiaroscuro Quartet " Haydn: String Quartets, Op.20 Nos 4-6 in 96/24 FLAC; which sounds phenomenal! The Steinberg driver defaulted to 44.1. I saw that you can change the settings up to DSD 5.6 MHz. I changed the setting to 192 kHz and it sounds pretty darn good.

First question is this possible with starting off with only a 96/24 file?

Many files on HDtracks are only in 44.1/24 which is only SACD quality, which I am a  big fan of, but if I am going to use the DAC I would prefer the  highest resolution possible if up-scaling does work for audio file.

My Oppo  player will upscale for  video but I could not find anything specific for high resolutions music files.

Second question FLAC or WAV? Or DSD?

Any other proverbial bones you  cats could throw me about High Rez would be greatly appreciated.

T




idigmusic64
3 responses Add your response
itzhak1969
515 posts
 
Upscaling process is a myth,The most important thing is how the original recording had been recorded ,if for example it was recorded at 44.1/24 upscaling it to 96/24 will not make it sound better .If you want to improve your sources you have to look for hi-res recordings.
erik_squires
16,056 posts
 
Hi OP,
Things are a little complicated, so bear with me.

While @itzhak1969 is partly right in that upsampling (converting from one format to another) adds no data, that does not mean it did not sound better.

In the old days DACs just performed much better at high resolutions, and it was not dependent on the original sampling rate. Over the past 15 years the gap between how well they played Redbook (44.1 kHz/16 bits) and high resolution (96kHz / 24 or higher) has really narrowed, and even budget DACs sound really good at Redbook playback. It is my suspicion, without evidence, that this is related to hyper accurate, cheap clocks becoming available, as well as better circuits to manage jitter on input.

Between FLAC and WAV I would say, try both. FLAC takes less space, but there are those who used to claim that FLAC playback was more prone to jitter due to the decompression involved.

The most important thing though is what you can hear. We can talk hypotheticals until the sun burns out, but if you can’t hear a difference, it doesn’t matter.


Best,

E
itzhak1969
515 posts
 
 DAC’s are improving constantly to such a degree that if you have a good cd transport you’ll here almost any difference between red book cd to hi-res files ,many listeners that in the past thought that CDs are harsh and bright in comparison to vinyl are now surprise how CDs can be sound great if using a good DAC.
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