It shouldn’t matter. If the FLAC is at 48k it means it will be able to reproduce sounds up to 24kHz, which is beyond human hearing.

My understanding is that higher rates (like 96k) are only useful during music production, in order to prevent aliasing. But for listening 48k is all you need.

The Nyquist theorem states that the highest frequency that can be replicated in a digital signal is half the signal’s sample rate.

Now if you have a 48kHz the highest frequency that can be replicated is 24kHz. Human hearing is known to go up to around 20kHz sometimes a little more, but over your lifetime the top end gets worse. So unless you’re trying to play music higher fidelity music for your pet (cat, dog, rodent, or horse) you don’t need higher sample rate music.

I guess I’ll have to ask the question… what exactly are you looking for? And why would you look for anything higher than 48k?

I’ll talk a bit about sample rate and DAC converters since you asked about it, and in case anyone is interested.

Short answer is: there is no proof whatsoever in any controlled measurement tests conducted to say that sample rates beyond 48kHz (arguably 44.1kHz) make any difference at all to what you hear. And if you look at the ADC/DAC process, you can pretty easily see why it really is like that. Basically, mathematically speaking, you will get the exactly same analog signal after the conversion, as long as your sample rate is at least twice as fast as your highest frequency. Naturally, in order to make sure this works, you need an anti-alias filter, which is why the standard has been set at 44.1kHz for so long. So modern devices reliably have had filters with a good enough slope to make 44.1kHz viable for decades now, never mind anything beyond that. Here’s a short explanation about the process

Why do some people talk so much about higher sample rates, then?

Higher sample rates do matter considerably in the following cases: you want to process your audio heavily, especially if you want to slow it down, extend its length and other time or frequency processes? You definitely want a higher sample rate. You want to synchronize your audio with video? In that case multiples of 48kHz would be recommended, so it can match with either 30fps or 24fps which are the two major standards. 44.1kHz may lead to synchronization problems, though modern day video editors have mostly fixed this issue, and DAWs like Reaper make sample rate look like a concern from the past with their excellent conversion system.

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Thanks for the good comments and suggestions everyone, i mostly use bandcamp but had forgotten 7digital existed

Oh I gotchu fam

• 7digital - https://us.7digital.com - It’s fine, UI is a bit wonky, selection is meh, customer support has always been great - Quality wavers between mp3 and flac, 24 is available in most places

• HDTracks - https://www.hdtracks.com/ - Much better selection and UI, downloading is a bit weird. Nice middle mix - Most is 24 bit flac but some drops off

• ProStudioMasters - https://www.prostudiomasters.com - Great Selection, requires their download manager but otherwise it’s fine. Very pricey though, but probably best quality you’ll find. Most is 24bit flac.

You don’t really need more than CD quality 44.1kHz/ 16 bit uncompressed audio. At that point the mix is more important. I try to go for early pressing of CDs and vinyl because I find most remasters are overly compressed and de noised, which sucks the life out the music.

But for new albums, I been liking SDEs reissue series on Blu Ray Audio, almost all of them have the best new stereo mixes I’ve heard of the albums they released and have Atmos mixes, if your interested in spacial audio. Apple Music has many of those albums, but they are compressed, even the Atmos versions.

Invidious servers which permit downloading tend to have ~130k audio only mp4’s files available

@leds From Bandcamp, mostly (if I find it there)