Any benefits in remixing a mp3 track?

[Anonymous5394]

A lot of encoders seem to encode to 128kb joint stereo and there is enough factual data/debate out there, that states the surround signals are "killed", but 128kb at stereo preserves the signal better. My question is, if you remix 128kb stereo to 192kb is it of benefit compared to remixing from 128kb joint to 192kbits either jointm/s stereo or stereo.

Or rather is it that the "damage" is done in the first place and signal/frequencies are lost irretrievably when encoding to 128kb from a Dolby source in the first place, whatever form you use at lower bitrates?

[guns1inger]

What's gone is gone. If the original file is damaged (i.e. the audio content is damaged) and you can restore some of it through filters then there might be a benefit, however if you are simply re-encoding at a higher bitrate, all you get is a bigger file that sounds the same.

[redwudz]

You can't get back what you don't have. But you could put the audio in a audio editor and 'tweak' it a little with the filters, add bass or clean it or change the response curves, then save it out as 192K and maybe get less quality loss than going back to 128K after filtering. Audacity has done wonders for some audio files I have modified.

[Anonymous5394]

As I suspected no benefit. The only real time it worked out qualitywise for me was remixing a mono track to stereo 192 or converting the odd track to Dolby 2.0 with TMPGenc after using a few filters etc.

Magix Audio Cleaning Lab has some great cleaning ability with its filters which can run automatically and it gives data graphs of tracks. Audacity I have used and is good as well. Thanks guys!