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Is 192kHz hi-res audio recording in studio worth it?


Øyvind Skald

What do you record in?  

27 members have voted

  1. 1. What resolution?

    • 44.1 kHz
      9
    • 48 kHz
      4
    • 44.1/48 kHz
      8
    • 88.2 kHz
      2
    • 96 kHz
      4
    • 192 kHz
      0
  2. 2. Do you think there is a point of recording in more than 44.1KHz

    • Yes
      16
    • No
      11


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3 minutes ago, Royal Yaksman said:

They don't  by default. But you can select it. What I am talking about is dry audio recording. I can't hear a difference there. Sure add some plugs that benefit from upsampling and that changes, but tracking dry audio? I'm not convinced.

This is where confusion lies. People listen to 2 mixes, mixed at different resolutions and the mixes involve plugs. Of course they hear a difference. But what has that got to do with the dry audio?

Exactly. I have the 96/24 official mixes of Dream Theaters selftitled album from 2013 and i canott hear a difference. I can se that they are in fact recorded in 96kHz by opeing them up in SoundForge and compair the wave forms to the 44.1 version  of the songs. I must say that the 5.1 surround mixes  is cooler...

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1 hour ago, pwalpwal said:

analog is a smooth curve, whereas digital is a stepped approximation to that

Digital is not stepped. 

When your audio is in digital format it is basically a large number of samples, i.e this volume at this point in time, not this volume until the next sample. They are points on a graph,  not blocks.

When you play back your digital audio it is converted back to analogue, ie a smooth curve. If you input a pure sine wave into a computer's ADC and then output it through the DAC, you get a pure sine wave. No steps are anywhere to be heard.

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At this point, 6 out of 15 voters record at higher than 44.1kHz, but only 4 out of 15 think there's any point at recording at higher rate.

I am one of those 4,  so at least 3 of the voters recording at higher than 44.1kHz think there's no point.  9_9

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4 hours ago, pwalpwal said:

yeah but they're listening to the the master encoded to mp3/whatever, so pre-encoding should be as hi-res as possible, and avoid transcoding... having said that, we've always listened to, for example, abbey road mastered stuff on our cheap hi-fi's, so what's the difference really? that's why we check the final version on multiple systems :)

Yep, I agree. It's funny though, I spend a lot of time getting my stuff tracked so that it's the highest quality I can produce. I check and double check through my AKG Studio grade headphones. Next I tweak while listening on the BX5a monitors, listen on my Kenwood home studio for a bit and export the file. Then I listen to the results through my cheap earbuds playing while attached to my cellphone, and through the stereo in my funky OLD pickup truck. If the mix can't pass the cheap headphone and funky old pickup truck test, it's back to the drawing board. I realize that somewhere in the world, someone will actually listen to my music under ideal conditions, so it's that possibility that makes me take the time to try and get everything else right I guess.

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1 hour ago, Wibbles said:

At this point, 6 out of 15 voters record at higher than 44.1kHz, but only 4 out of 15 think there's any point at recording at higher rate.

I am one of those 4,  so at least 3 of the voters recording at higher than 44.1kHz think there's no point.  9_9

I did put the  44.1/48 kHz up there because YouTube only uses 48 kHz audio. So for making music/sounds to YouTube i guess using 48 kHz is best.  I cant hear any loss in sound when resampling from 44.1 kHz to 48 kHz.  But  i  do record in it when making something specific for YouTube/video, just just to get the same sound trough to the video.

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Here we go again. It can be argued that the math show exactly that there's nothing to be gained within the spectrum of audio that humans can actually perceive by going higher than 44.1. My buddy who is a speaker designer, worked for Gibson, JBL now Samsung and does TONS of measurements AND is a musician too agrees.

Old me? I have recorded in many, many places, from Capitol Studios and Ocean Way to a closet; have used endless amounts of gear, from $5000 preamps to $2 ones. Have engineered., mixed, mastered for myself and others. Recorded a track or two for "Modern Art" for which we were nominated for a Grammy at home through a ART DPS2, a $150 preamp into my 2408 and everybody thought the sound killed. I've experimented with higher sample rates and have come to the conclusion that there is no difference, other than some synths or programs that simply behave differently when running at 96K; for the audio itself there is NO discernible difference in my opinion.

 

R

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22 hours ago, pwalpwal said:

jut to be clear, i'm not talking about recording audio at higher res, nor playback at higher resolutions, i'm talking about in the box mixing/summing of 1s and 0s, dither be damned :D

It doesn't matter. The stair-steps are one way to interpret a series of values on a graph. But the lines between the points are imaginary and don't exist in reality. We are talking about pulses with a certain amplitude, taken at a constant time interval. Think a series of lollipops with equal distance to each other, where only the length of the stick varies.

This has implications, because it means that as long as a signal contains for example no frequencies above 20 kHz, it doesn't matter if it's captured at a pulse rate of 44.1 kHz, or 192 kHz. The reconstructed signal looks identical. There are no stairs that get smaller at higher sample rates. It has nothing to do with dither, which would only be relevant to the lengths of the lollipop sticks, not the (imaginary) information between them.

The zero-order-hold (stair stepped) representation of digital voltage sampling is maybe one of the biggest reasons why people think analog is somehow intrinsically more clean/continuous than digital audio, when in reality even the cheapest AD/DA chipsets beat practically any analog recording medium in terms of noise and lack of distortion.

This is why when you right-click a WAV or AIFF file in Windows, you'll be told that the file contains PCM data, where PCM stand for Puls-Code-Modulation.

By the way, I voted 96 kHz because I made a few tests and came to the conclusion that I can substantially mitigate aliasing artifacts when using heavy distortion. As the final delivery medium I'm completely content with properly band-passed 44.1 kHz.

Edited by Michael Anderwald
Typo.
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21 hours ago, synkrotron said:

recording/mixing/mastering my "music" is not going to help it at all... 

Of course that's just me being negative so that you all go check out my shit and make a purchase.

 

 

have a nice day

I already have, thanks. Great stuff.  :D

 

Wibbles loves a drone. B|

 

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21 hours ago, synkrotron said:

recording/mixing/mastering my "music" is not going to help it at all... 

Of course that's just me being negative so that you all go check out my shit and make a purchase.

 

 

have a nice day

I dont know if you have any Inspiration from Christopher Franke, but I can  hear something there.

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