320kbps MP3 Sampling Rate through Traktor Audio 10

Sorry if this has already been posted or a stupid question but I'm fairly new to these forums (even though been mixing for around 15 years)...

So I've recently bought Traktor Scratch Pro A10 (after getting sick of lugging around 700+ CD's not to mention a preference for mixing vinyl) meaning I can now have easy access to my music library of 5000+ tracks on either DVS or Timecode CD's.

My question is... Traktor A10 can obviously output sound @ 24bit / 96kHz but if I'm playing an already compressed MP3 @ 320kbps / 44.1kHz through Traktor, does this make any difference to the sound thats output through my speakers, or is the output limited by quality of the track being played??

Does the 24 bit / 96kHz output through Traktor only apply when playing a master/wave format track that has a high sample rate/bit depth to start with??

Stick to the settings that match your source audio, otherwise you are simply oversampling the audio, putting some extra strain on the CPU with no real gain.

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Originally Posted by padi_04

Stick to the settings that match your source audio, otherwise you are simply oversampling the audio, putting some extra strain on the CPU with no real gain.

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Thanks for the tip Padi_04!!

In saying that though - my CPU handles it no worries at all so thats not an issue but what are the effects of oversampling the audio??

I've noticed if I record a single track through Traktor that is an MP3 (i.e. originally around 13.3MB in size), @ 1411kbps/44,100Hz the resulting recording is 60.5MB and @ 3072kbps/96,000Hz it's 125.6MB, but the latter (bigger file) has slightly warmer tones (although I could be imagining this)...

Can you elaborate any further??

Audio quality will always be measured by the weakest link in the chain. Higher quality audio files will be smooth (closer to analog) only if the source material is either a live recording or a file with higher or equal quality. A clear example of this is people who burn youtube rips or low bitrate MP3s on CDs and think that it sounds better because it is now a WAV (lossless) file, the sound quality will be just as "steppy" as the original file.

http://sites.psu.edu/danlombardo/wp-...italanalog.png

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Originally Posted by Brenzy

My question is... Traktor A10 can obviously output sound @ 24bit / 96kHz but if I'm playing an already compressed MP3 @ 320kbps / 44.1kHz through Traktor, does this make any difference to the sound thats output through my speakers, or is the output limited by quality of the track being played??

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There are a LOT of details that go into a "complete" answer, and I do not have time to write them all down.

If you were recording new audio into the computer from an analog source (vinyl or a mic), using the higher sampling rate does offer some benefits.

The quality of the weakest link in the whole signal chain will limit the final quality. In this case, there is no way to recover the information lost in the compression to mp3.

The mp3 will be expanded by the codec back into a "full waveform." Missing information is "filled in" with a "best guess." Overall, the effect is pretty good, but not the same as starting with a lossless file format.

The upsampling from 44.1khz to 96khz takes a significant amount of CPU time. There is nothing to be gained by that upsampling when playing back recorded material. If you can change the sampling rate of the A10 to match the 44.1khz of the mp3 files (or wav files) that will reduce the CPU load on your computer significantly.

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Originally Posted by padi_04

"steppy" ...

http://sites.psu.edu/danlombardo/wp-...italanalog.png

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This is 100% wrong and based on a complete lack of understanding of how digital audio works.

That being said, no, oversampling doesn't improve quality. mp3s all sound like garbage. And the easiest thing for your computer (which loses nothing) is to stick to 44.1kHz output. 16bit or 24bit only matters if you're doing weird things with gain staging, and it makes basically no difference if you have traktor setup to near it's defaults excpet that you're sending more data down the pipe (with no extra information).

For anyone who is interested in a longer discussion of 16bit -v- 24bit.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/415361/24bi...-myth-exploded

And here's one that talks about why higher sampling rates are irrelevant or harmful.

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Originally Posted by soundinmotiondj

For anyone who is interested in a longer discussion of 16bit -v- 24bit.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/415361/24bi...-myth-exploded

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This article gets everything right. It doesn't hurt anything to use 24-bit output, but you don't get anything either.

The comment I made about gain staging was in relation to how I run Traktor. I set all my channel gainst at like -16dB (instead of close to 0) so that I know I have headroom for my effects instead of wondering how in the hell Traktor takes a file that's slammed to 0dBFS and already distorting if output at unity and then adds gain and somehow doesn't become a distorted, disgusting mess.

Seriously, in years of trying to figure it out, Traktor's gain staging still baffles me because they don't give enough details and their meters aren't all reading the same things.

Anyway....this is all a little off the mark. The answer to the OP's question is that if he has problems with his sound quality, the first thing to do is stop using mp3s.