I suppose you could argue that it’s not important because most people can’t hear an audible difference between 256 AAC and lossless FLAC. But for those that buy lossless music, it would be nice to hear it at 44.1, or a multiple thereof.
So what’s happening is Plex is outputting the audio at whatever the native bitrate is, and then Windows Direct Sound is downsampling it to 48kHz before sending it to the DAC. The only way around this is to utilize ASIO or Wasapi drivers to the DAC directly.
Which DAC are you using? If it has a screen it will show you what bitrate it is receiving. Ideally you want it to be bitperfect, but if not, then at least upsample to a multiple of the original track. In the case of redbook this would be 44.1 and you’d want to upsample to 88.2, not 96kHz.
Technically, all of these introduce distortion, which again defeats the purpose of lossless audio (with the exception of clicks on bitrate change which can be compensated for instead the DAC itself).
Overall, I suppose I would have hoped this community would have been more open to a new perspective than having moderators act dismissively condescending, or say that the opinion of an audiophile doesn’t matter.
I may be in the minority, but that doesn’t mean I am incorrect or the my opinion doesn’t count.
