Suppose I have a FLAC music file and I convert it to let’s say 192 kbps mp3 and then I use this 192 kbps file as a base and create another conversion to 160 kbps.
Not supose I take the source Flac file again and convert directly to 160 kbps.
Do both 160 kbps files have the same quality?
No, each time you introduce a lossy encode you’ll further degrade the file beyond the strict lossless > lossy.