I am currently using Foobar2000 for flac and flac alone. I do not listen to any other formats on my PC. I am currently using realtek 850 Nforce4 onboard sound via SPDIF to a Panasonic XR-55 and a pair of axiom m3ti speakers (or sometimes sennheiser 280 headphones)

My question; does resampling to 44100 actually play back at 44100 when resampled as such and is it best to use this mode when I only use FLAC which have been encoded at 44100? I have read that Nforce 4 boards automatically play back at 48hz. So is there any benefit in resampling to 44100 or is it a wasted process? I also have a chaintek AV-710 but I had difficulties using kernal streaming with it and it crackles and looses its signal in games more often than the nvidia card. I would go back to the chaintek if it were able to provide better audio quality for FLAC.


I am sensitive enough to notice a difference between resample modes etc so I will pretty much do anything to bring more depth and clarity to my music.

foobar has many options that let you configure it like resampling on the fly... so if you have a soundcard that plays back with 48k you might consider to use those software resamplers (to 48k) because they usually give a higher quality. But i don't hear those differences anyway...

If you sense the differences between resampling modes just pick the better soundine one.

So, your FLAC files are at 44 kHz and your soundcard wants to play 48 kHz. That means someone has to resample the 44 kHz content to 48 kHz. You can setup Foobar to resample to 48kHz or let Foobar send the 44 kHz signal to the soundcard drivers and resampling to 48 kHz is done somewhere else. What is best for you pretty much depends on the soundcard's internal resampling capabilities/quality and how it compares to Foobar's resampler. Foobar's resampling and dithering is probably the better option quality-wise.

BTW: It's very likely that you just believe that you can sense the differences (called placebo effect).

Seb

But what if I resample to 44100? Maybe it's a placebo effect but it does sound better to me when I set resample to 44100. What I am trying to do is avoid upsampling to 48000hz when the content default is 44100hz.

You can't resample to 44.1Khz if you're already at 44.1KHz. Instead, you're doing nothing, and the sound card is resampling to 48KHz.

You're definately fooling yourself into hearing an improvement.