Yes so i am having a chat with one of my IRL buddies and he started quizzing about sample rates? I have always just set anything i have ever owned to 44.1 for years and just left it. Like don't even question it. In my very early days i did 96 and it sort of filled up my hard drive pretty quick if i recall correctly.
Why is 44.1 the most common. or seemingly most common. Without seeing his rig in person and being able to get my hands on it i can't really help him out. He says the lowest sample rate he can get on his mackie unit is 48. Why wouldn't a seemingly standard 44.1 sample rate be available?
44.1 is redbook CD so that's why ..... anytime you put something on audio CD it's gonna be 16bit/44.1k.
You can have CDs at higher rates but they won't play on normal CD players ..... it'd have to be on a puter with a player that supports it or I can play up to 96k on my Masterlinks.
For a good while CD quality was the highest and that was 44.1 which was decided upon because a thing called nyquist theory says that if you sample something a bit more than twice as fast as it's frequency, you can reconstruct it correctly.
So to have a 20-20k freq range on CDs they decided on 44.1k.
So until maybe 10 years ago or so, 44.1k was the standard.
With the proliferation of playing music on 'puters came faster rates and 24bit and now 32bit and even higher.
bits has to do with the noise floor and dynamic range.
96k allows you to reconstruct up to around 46k which is obviously not audible.
BUT there are things called brick wall filters that are required to prevent aliasing sounds and they cause their own issues because at 44.1k the artifacts are right above where things can be audible.
With a higher sampling rate you can have much more benign filters up on the top-end plus any aliasing noise would be too high in freq to hear.
And there have been studies that suggest that even audio above the human freq range can affect how you hear things at the higher freqs within the audible range
What Lt. Bob wrote!
For Home Recording 24 bit allows more scope a little like not maxing the loudness before sending the track for mastering.
This isn't exactly on topic but is closely related and touches on the issue of 16 versus 24 in an understandable & audible way...
[BBvideo=560,315]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iDrbgfPjPY[/BBvideo]
44.1 is generally a high enough sample rate because of a thing called the Nyquist Frequency (*edit* I just re-read Bob's post and saw that he already explained it). That frequency is half of the sampling rate, and represents the highest frequency that can be represented at the given sample rate.
So 44,100 samples per second can represent frequencies up to 22,050 Hz, which is well above the hearing range of most humans. Some adolescents and teenagers can hear that high, but just barely. At our ages, we've lost the ability to hear that high long ago.
Most Hi-Fi and Pro Audio gear can record and reproduce a frequency range between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. So even if you manage to produce a sound that has any useful information at higher frequencies than 22 kHz, it'll be lost when it's played back on most audio systems.
The main argument that I've heard for recording at higher sample rates involves harmonics that are produced at those frequencies, and how they affect our perception of sounds that are in the "normal" hearing range. Personally, I don't buy it.
If you're doing business with a major studio, then you'll want to record at 192 kHz. That's just the standard today. I think it's pointless, but that seems to be what any "pro" expects to receive.
I record at 48 kHz just because that's the standard sample rate for audio that accompanies video. So just as a convenience, I record at 48 kHz so I can seamlessly integrate my audio projects into video projects without running the risk of weird things happening as things are resampled. If it weren't for that, I'd just record at 44.1 kHz all the time.
If you're doing business with a major studio, then you'll want to record at 192 kHz. That's just the standard today. I think it's pointless, but that seems to be what any "pro" expects to receive.
The last two projects I did in pro studious were recorded at 192khz. There is no discernible audio advantage in the tracks I did at 192 compared to what I normally do at 44.1.
