No, upconverting does nothing. It's like taking a colour photograph of a black and white picture. Converting to a higher definition format will not add any extra information.
placing a 16/44 signal into a bigger box has no benefit for the signal itself as we can't create resolution out of nowhere. you're correct about that, but the DAC could handle a different resolution differently. be it because that DAC works on a specific sample rate, or because it's some NOS weirdness so more likely than not, the low sample rate signals will suck(aliasing or treble roll off, usually both). if you send an oversampled signal to that type of device, you could end up with a better fidelity. of course it then begs the question, "why have a NOS DAC in the first place?".
I believe that those problems can and will reach audibility in some cases, but for what I consider a competently designed DAC, oversampling the signal beforehand shouldn't have much of a benefit, and might in some case make things worst objectively. although I personally can't be bothered by this because I expect the changes to occur at levels and frequencies I don't care about, and because I never was into exotic DAC designs that required special care, as I consider most of them faulty
Thanks for the honest non-snippy responses and excuse my ignorance. So 24 bit 96kHz is only for ripping from vinyl or other high res sources?
It's interesting because I hear something other than line level difference (though it only really comes through to me as listener fatigue). Guess I'll keep experimenting.
be careful here. vinyl is an analog source, so it makes sense to record it at higher resolution to optimize the digital capture of the signal(even more so if we plan to apply some denoiser or other DSPs in post processing). just like in a studios they're going to record a band at really high resolution, work on the record and then make a release at CD resolution, 24/96, or whatever the client asked for. that's when you capture an analog signal. but if you rip a CD, it's already digital content at 16/44. the highest fidelity rip you can ever get from it is the exact 16/44 replica. anything else will objectively have lower resolution as it won't be as close to the CD reference.
Forgive me for slightly hijacking, but if I have the CD and/or FLAC file, what software (Win or Linux) would I use to up-convert or re-rip to 24-bit/96 kHz or even AIFF 32bit / 384kHz or DSD256? I'm interested in testing to see if I can hear a difference and if it's worth up-converting. Thank you.
several audio players will offer some re-sampling options or will let you add it through VST, and pretty much any ripping tool will have that too. you can look up SoX(Sound eXchange) that will have it all and is usually praised for the quality of the conversions.I use SoX in foobar mainly to create test files and to down convert the few hires albums. it's multi platform, exists in many forms that can be integrated to several audio players.
in non free solution, I've read HQplayer mentioned many times, it apparently has many settings to fool around with. but again I never cared much myself so you'll have to ask people who have hand on experience with that for more in depth feedback.
