I thought I'd heard the term 'upscaling' before, but I think it only applies to video..

That then made me think that upsampling only meant the sample rate and there was another term for the bit rate..

I wonder if it might have sounded better at 88.2 instead of 96 - no rounding errors to entertain with a straight doubling of samplerate.
How something handles complicated maths of say 44.1 into 96 can be strongly dependent on the competance of the algorythm and whoever wrote it. Whether one hears the difference much between good and bad algorythms I don't know - I remember reading Tom(?) Faulkner saying he did (the audio engineer who wrote in Hifi News from time to time).