Comment by MSFT_Edging
11 hours ago
I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
A lot of old stuff was also encoded way worse than one might think from the alleged bitrate. A while ago I went through a ton of old files, and everything that sounded shitty (or, far more commonly, stuff I downloaded but didn’t care about) got yeeted.