I need advice about sample rates and bit depth and upsampling thingies

[Laurixas]

Recently i moved from winamp to foobar2000 and i am lost what to use. i got a plugin for direct kernel streaming. i heard its make playback bit perfect. also i set output bit depth to 24bit. i also downloaded sox upsampler but for example if my musis is in 16bit 44.1kHz should i use 192khz upsampling or 4x to be in 44.1*2*2? or maybe i should use that upsampling at all? yes before you asked i use external DAC: Asio Xonar U7. i set settings to 192kHz and 24bit which it maximum it supports. i heard rumors that DAC this way not work up to that quality but also upscales music and sounds to that settings. is that true? or maybe not all DAC's do that? so please tell me it upsamples or not? and depending it does or not should i use software upsampling alone/together? bit thanks to those who will help me

 

[Chodi]

  Recently i moved from winamp to foobar2000 and i am lost what to use. i got a plugin for direct kernel streaming. i heard its make playback bit perfect. also i set output bit depth to 24bit. i also downloaded sox upsampler but for example if my musis is in 16bit 44.1kHz should i use 192khz upsampling or 4x to be in 44.1*2*2? or maybe i should use that upsampling at all? yes before you asked i use external DAC: Asio Xonar U7. i set settings to 192kHz and 24bit which it maximum it supports. i heard rumors that DAC this way not work up to that quality but also upscales music and sounds to that settings. is that true? or maybe not all DAC's do that? so please tell me it upsamples or not? and depending it does or not should i use software upsampling alone/together? bit thanks to those who will help me

 
I went through the whole process of trying up  sampling in both foobar and JRiver. I could hear a difference when I used the up sampling but in the end it was really degrading the sound more than helping. The fact is that there does not seem to be any practical way to improve Redbook material (16/44.1) , In short, you cannot add information or extract information that isn't there. In my case using up sampling only gave the impression of more detail because things got brighter. I later learned this was a byproduct of the up sampling process. Not very desirable although you might like what it does. I play back all my material in it's native format now. In my opinion that sounds the most natural.
 
My dac allows for input up to 192K so I am only limited by the source. Frankly well done Redbook sounds very good to me.
 
Oh....and welcome to the forum!

 

[PleasantSounds]

You can keep the bit depth at 24 bit - that's harmless and can be useful if you use digital volume control.
Regarding the sampling rate, as Chodi said - any resampling will only degrade performance.