Question about how samplers pick sampling rate

The Lounge Other Gear
#1

Hi
So, the MC-707 can sample ‘up to’ 96 kHz.

I’m not sure how samplers such as these determine at what rate they will do the sampling?

For example, there’s no setting that I know of on the MC-707 where you can set the sampling rate.

Is it at all related to the original sample rate of the audio content being sampled?

In the case of things like Digitakt, OT mkII – I believe their sampling rates are fixed at 48 and 44.1kHz, respectively. (but irrespective of sample rate of original audio file)

In the case of MC-707, when does it sample at 96kHz and when will it sample below that?

Not a technical problem here, just curious to gain an understanding of how this works.

–thanks–

#2

The MC-707 supports user samples from 32–96 kHz, 16-bit and 24-bit (mono/stereo), but I don’t think it can sample at various rates and resolutions.

I guess it cannot even replay at 96kHz, but will convert them down to whatever it uses internally when they get loaded, because 96kHz would simply require doubling the memory and processing costs compared to 48kHz.

Update:

When examine the specs it looks like that it records only in 44.1kHz and uses internally also only 44.1kHz (suggested by “available format for looper sample”). So don’t believe what resellers like Sweetwater write about a machine.

#3

Thank you for breaking it down.

As usual marketing tactics are used to confuse buyers about specs, at least me.

I understand why it’s 44.1kHz internally, but it would be a pretty poor sampler if it couldn’t handle a 96kHz 24-bit file nowadays, no?

I haven’t read enough other machines specs to know if that needs to be explicitly stated or not.

#4

Yeah, the usual marketing tactics. Sometimes you need to dig quite deep to get to the real facts.

Well, it depends on the feature set. For example the OT requires all files to be 44.1kHz, but this stems from the fact that it can play directly from the CF card without any conversion step on load involved. Converting on the fly up to 8x stereo streams from the card would be simply too much I guess (96kHz down to 44.1kHz isn’t that straight forward).

For the DT all the conversion is done via the upload tool on the computer automatically. There it makes no sense to store stereo files or files with other rates than the 48kHz on the quite space limited internal 1GB +drive.

#5

OK, … I usually sample into both of those machines (OT and digitakt), so I guess the conversion of sample rates is no problem for their internal samplers? (even though Digitakt only samples in mono)

#6

Sampling input doesn’t require a sample rate conversion, it’s sampling the signal at the native rate to begin with.

2 Likes
#7

ahh … yes !