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?
Tl;dr no
But what are you trying to do?
Simple. I have limited space in my phone and I want to store around 160 kbps mp3 files on it (VBR). So the question is what source file I should get for best quality. Of course Flac is best and if I can use 320 kbps files, it would still be worse than using Flac as source. I thinking about storage space here.