Re:Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Charact...
by jdietrich on Monday January 21, 2019 @05:46AM
(#18959386)
The 24/192 part is irrelevant - there's no audible difference between properly-mastered 16/44.1 and 24/192 audio. No adult human can hear anything above 22kHz; 16 bits provides 96dB of undithered dynamic range and ~120dB of perceived dynamic range with shaped dither.
You can hear the degradation from 16/44.1 bitstream to 320kbps or 192kbps VBR MP3, but you need good gear and good ears. I'm perfectly happy to listen to properly encoded MP3s because the difference is very slight, but I'd still use uncompressed or lossless formats for archival purposes.
Chances are my soundblaster soundcard does not support either of those.
Similarly, you can't just diff two different recording of two different sample rates without conversion, so the conversion would either introduce artifacts if upsampling (and if it wouldn't, you wouldn't hear a difference) or render any advantage obsolete if downsampling the high sample rate. Obviously depends on the algorithm used, but you should target whatever your soundcard supports.