Originally Posted by
papo
That will show you what the file's bitrate claims to be.
For example:
You rip an track in lossless quality from a CD. Then you compress to 320kbps. You will have a true 320kbps bitrate track.
Now if some one transcodes a 192kbps (CBR) to FLAC format, it is basically a lossy to lossless transcode, which is bad.
The file will claim its, let's say 320kbps or higher, but won't really be a "high-quality" audio file. Source file was a 192kbps.
the only real way to find out, is to open the track in a application that let's you look at the spectrum analysis to see where the frequencies start falling off.