Huh! I wasn't aware you could do that! Interesting, and probably worth a listen. Increasing the bit depth should not affect the sound because the extra bits will just be padded with zeros because there is no original data to put in there. Upsampling to a multiple of 44.1kHz like 88.2kHz should not affect the sound quality either, since it will just put X number of identicle samples next to each other until a different sample comes along from the CD. But when you upsample to a non-integer(?) multiple like 96kHz, the app is forced to interpret the data and redraw the wave from scratch. Don't know if dbPoweramp is up to that from audiophile standpoint. Pros pay a lot of money for good upsampling plugins for their editing software. If it works well, then it might sound a little smoother, but my experience with hardware upsamplers (which always have limited processing power) is that they take away some of the life and transient purity. I usually prefer to kill the upsampling when possible. But it may not be the math's fault. A more modern algorithm with abundant processing power and time to kill might do a better job. If you look at the waveform of a 44.1kHz signal at 10kHz, like in Stereophile reviews of digital players, you can see the benefit of interpolating a higher bitrate to smooth out the waveform.
Another viewpoint:
http://www.mother-of-tone.com/cd.htmRich
