Upsampling..........

I'm not sure of the science, but it works. I believe that Seandtaylor99 above does a commendable job of an explanation. I recently installed an upsampler on a CD player (AH! 4000) that I was already familiar with and pleased with. The change was dramatic, though it's been taking a while to break in.

-Darren

Hi Dave,
my wife would get it because we're both engineers ! In fact we often have nerd type conversations regarding audio, even though she's not interested in hifi, and she calls me a geek whenever I tinker with my system.

By the way I've never known the difference between upsampling and oversampling .... I suspect that they may be the same thing, but that the marketroids decided that upsampling is a more marketable term.

As an engineer I must say .... "Damn those marketroids !".

See Goldy! Not a stupid question after all. The current top of the line Zanden Dac/transport retails for $43,440.00. It doesn't up sample or over sample. Straight red-book only. Seantaylor99 mentions a filter and brick wall. The Zanden claimes better sound with out this filter and brick wall.
It's all above my head. I just listen to what sounds best to me in my price range and go for it.

Sean,
As far as the audio enthusiast is concerned there is no difference between oversampling & upsampling.
However, from an engineering perspective, there is a technical difference: oversampling is a repeat operation where the input data is simply read at the higher rate again & again (i.e. oversampling ratio). As you well know, this creates an aliased signal that repeats every Fs. In upsampling we zero-stuff & later use a digital filter to estimate what the values of the zero-stuffed samples should be. In this case, too, the operation creates aliased signals that repeat every Fs. So, in both cases we need a digital filter to attenuate the aliased signal & preserve the audio spectrum. This digital filter can be the same for oversampling & upsampling! Thus, these 2 operations really look very similar. FWIW.