Upsampling on Android !

I'm intrigued by the subject of audio upsampling and have been reading various articles on this, some would say controversial topic. Firstly let me explain. I have a mish mash of audio equipment in the DAP sense of the word. I have a selection of various dedicated DAP players and also old upcycled mobile phones as overflow storage/media players. I found out recently that apparently android upsamples 44.1khz audio to 48khz. Most audiophiles are totally against this and prefer "Bit perfect". My question on this topic is the following: Why does android upsample to 48khz?.....I sort of get the logic of 48khz working alongside film as apparently it's a compatible sample rate. What I don't get is why this is altered on android?.....Does anyone know why this is and also what, in simple terms the pros and cons are?.....any ideas please ?

 

The reason why Android (and Windows under most circumstances) upsamples everything to 48k is convenience. It allows tracks of different sample rates to be crossfaded, and given that most Android (and Windows) users don't even know what sample rates are, or care, there's no reason not to.

Modern software sample rate converters work transparently anyway, so it's extremely unlikely that anyone could tell whether any upsampling has taken place.

There's even a whole audiophile thing about upsamplers to 96k and 176k and further, but that's based on a complete lack of understanding of how digital audio works.

Whilst I too like the idea of 'bit perfect', in practice it makes no difference to the listening experience, so don't worry about it. The BBC used to sample at 44.1k for radio, as much of the music came from CD, but anything for TV, which included radio news as they shared sound tracks, was done at 48k. The split distribution was abandoned some time ago, so all BBC audio output has been at 48k regardless of the originating sample rate. I'm not aware of any complaints.

S.

 

Thanks for that very clear explanation. Now I totally understand. I must admit that after "Blind" testing tracks i could not identify either way which was which. My original confusion came about from some (not all) audiophiles slating the process but not saying the reasons for it. Many thanks