44, 48, 96, 192 Kz sample rates...

[Majorek]

Hi guys!

I'd really like to have your inputs on this. I spent some time on the web exploring forums and posts by people about the sample rates to use, 44, 48, 96, 192. There seems to have no consensus, everybody have their own opinions. Some say human ears will never be able to hear de difference between 48Kz or 96Kz. Some others say yes, use 96Kz instead it's better, etc and etc.

What's your opinion on this? I'm sure some of you have solid anwsers cause I am a bit lost with all that. (I'm sampling all my audio at 48Kz by the way, and I'm totally satisfied. Should I really go higher? Would that be usefull?)

Share your thoughts on this, or links if you have some!

Cheers!

[ejwells]

whhy not do a session at 96, and find out if it sounds better to you?

[Majorek]

I was talking about sample rates for audio, the .wav's when you bounce to disk. Not the Pro Tools sessions. Like, can we really hear the difference between a sample at 48 and the same one at 96? It's worth the space on my hard drive?

[EGS]

Originally Posted by Majorek

It's worth the space on my hard drive?

No. Get better instruments, mics, pres, converters, room treatment, monitors --- instead of higher sample rates. My 2 cents.

[O.G. Killa]

yeah I agree. comparing a 48KHz mix upsampled to 96KHz (which is what is essentially happening if you bounce to disk from your 48KHz and choose 96KHz in the BTD window) will have no audible difference whatsoever.

But... doing certain effects to audio that is recorded at 96KHz can sometimes yield more pleasing results than at 48KHz. A big one is pitch shift. Record something at 96KHz and then start pitch shifting it all over the place... You'll notice it sounds a lot better when pitch shifted than the same sound recorded at 48KHz. How is that even useful in music production??? Autotune and Melodyne!!! The "effects" of tuning vocals can be less apparent if you record at 96KHz.

Also, theoretically, certain other plugins can sound better at higher sampling rates. i'm not going to get into a debate as to which types of plugins would benefit from the higher sampling rate, only to say that yes it can make a difference.

Also, if you are having issues with latency, recording at 96KHz can be helpful in certain situations. Latency is usually a fixed number of samples regardless of sampling rate. So, increasing the speed of the sampling rate by double decreases the latency by half. If your system has 100 samples of latency, 100 samples at 48,000 samples per second is a greater span of time than 100 samples at 96,000 samples per second.

[Majorek]

Awesome O.G Killa! You demystified some points for me with clear facts. I understand better now. Good tip to know about the pitch shift, pretty sure it goes for time stretch too.

[SpinningDisk]

Remember though about your system. Not all system will react the same. You need to find a happy medium. I have a Native system and then you have the HD and the old TDM. I could be wrong. If so, please correct me so I can learn. In other words I stick around 48 because I can't open that many tracks, plugins, edits etc..

[necjamc]

bouncing to 96KHz will also give you better headroom for mastering effects if you are mastering it. If you are just bouncing to play back then think of it this way, DVD is 24bit 48KHz, cd's are 44.1 so you don't really need anything over 48k IMO for just playback.

[nst7]

Keep in mind that recording at 88 or 96 will pretty much double the amount of hard drive space that is taken up.

[Eric Seaberg]

I've had conversations with several major mixers and MOST of them feel 96k isn't worth the extra drive space or bit-rate through the system. However, 192k is VERY impressive and well worth it for SOME projects.

I started a project a couple of weeks ago that I had planned on doing at 96k. Our SSL console will only do 48k or 96k so we figured why not try it for high-resolution Stereo and 5.1 mixes later. We had to dumb down to 48k because the arranger/producer only had a 48k PT system at his house. TOO BAD!

I really don't think we would have heard any difference, but with Blu-Ray looking to be a great way to distribute HiRes music in the future, we wanted to start out that way and keep the project at the end product SR. Some other time.