Upsampling - but seriously folks

jimspov,

You are right. It actually makes things sound worse, at least for my dac which can upsample 2x, 4x, 8x and to dsd. I find it best to go with upsampling off.

J.

Any fans of upsampling out there? Anyone have experience with upsampling in which it actually makes your source sound better?

yeah, I have one CDP (a Wadia) that does upsampling well & I seem to like the sonics from it. It upsamples to 24/96 only. Like Erik mentioned Wadia has spent  a lot of time coming up with some fancy algorithms that sound good. there are 3 choices (called A, B, C) that i can choose from. I believe choice A is their 'digimaster" algo & choices B & C put the listener at different locations in a hall. This unit always upsamples with no option to turn it off. 

Personally I don't see how it can possible make any difference, b

you couldn't be more wrong!! ;-)
Upsampling makes a big difference, often for the worse but there are several cases where the resulting sonics are very good. It all depends on the algorithm. Much work has been done in this arena by (Boothroyd-Stuart) Meridian, Wadia & EMM Labs. Of course there're many others now. 
I've seen a lot of people posting on A'gon that they prefer their DAC's sonics with the upsampling turned off & I've also seen a lot of other posts where people like the effect of upsampling.
You are going to get a whole range of replies here. Better to search the archives here - there's a LOT written on this subject.....

  

It is usually recommended that you play back at the sampling rate of the original recording. I have tried upsampling up to 24/192 and do not hear any difference. This is very dac dependent
Alan

Right... Your DAC may have a sweet spot it likes to play at, and this could potentially make for an improvement, but it likely won't amount to much.

On computeraudiophile the rage seems to be using HQ Player to upsample to quad DSD. There's about a 100pg long thread about it there, which I don't have the patience to read. I can't recommend it because I haven't heard it(would like to), but it's hard to conclude that upsampling definitely can't help unless you have tried that approach and don't hear any benefit. That approach seems to have captured the hearts and attention of many who spend much time focusing on getting the most out of their bits. Cheers,
Spencer