Bit rate and frequency

I feel like I know the answer, but why should one record at 24/96 when a device is putting out 16/48? I do it, but I am not sure why…

Maybe for consistency sake, if all your project audio files are 24bit/96khz

As far as sound quality is concerned, there will be no perceivable or measurable change.

Higher Bit Rates give you greater dynamic range, that is a greater amount of maximum headroom above the noise floor of the system. However, if your source material already has a noise floor defined by a 16bit recording, then a 24 bit recording will not improve this.

Higher sampling rates are only useful if your signal bandwidth is greater than 20khz. Considering the human ear can only hear ~ 20khz this will have no effect. Higher sampling rates (above 48khz) have their place in a DSP technique called “oversampling”.

Also…

Higher samplerates can give a more accurate reconstruction of signal with high frequency components.

Since high freq means fast wave modulation (read transients)
A sample rate of 44.1kHz gives something like two to interpolate a signal at 20.000 Hz
A sample rate of 88.2 kHz gives you four samples and the reconstruction of that signal is closer to what was happening at that frequency.

also, i find the use of high samplerate (speaking of 192kHz) important if you plan to use those samples (audiofiles) for extreme pitch shifting (usually down-shifts) in order to have a good stretching without too many artifacts.

Would be fun to use a 100kHz microphone, then down-shifting all of what we can’t hear in order to make it audible :joy:

Unfortunately i do not have such a microphone :sob:

I was always under the impression a higher samplerate was to combat aliasing wile recording, for our computers to recreate the waveform without noticeable steps in the audio, never thought of relating that to my samples that get extreme pitch shifting, sweet! Am i close? haha… :zonked:

of course you need to work in a 192 kHz or less DAW session.
after the shift you can downsample to any 44100/48000.

The aliasing is beaten by using double the frequency of the maximum frequency available in the system…so, for our ears 2 x 20000Hz

Yes i see now, good man sicijk.

Note that at higher sampling rates let’s say 88.2 vs 44.1, your plugins and processing will be working two times harder. This can lead to more precise reverb tails, better stretching and so on.

Try to look at it as if your working in Photoshop or paint with a high res image. Fades, texts and effects will be less pixelised compared to when working on low res images.

That being said, I see many people tracking in 44.1 then the mix engineers oversample the tracks for the final mix.

I work in a professional recording and mixing studio. I usually go for 44.1-24
And if plan to record at higher sample rate I would already know i’ll regret somehow since the final product will be listened 99% on piezo speaker :sob:

precisely!