I ve just bought a new audio interface ( mackie onyx producer 2.2) after a long time that i spent with an old mbox mini that i bought in 2007.Obviously there s no comparison between the two, and like most audio interfaces around these days, this one too can record at a sample rate up to 192khz. So i armed pro tools, and did all the setups,but when i started experimenting with some plugins ,expecially waves plugins,i noticed some of them were missing.I checked and rechecked, then i had some sort of intuition and wondered if maybe they were not visible because they didn t run at such a high sample rate.I then went to waves site and found out that even among the newest stuff, many plugins rut at a maximum of 96khz. No big deal, i reset the project to the lower sample rate,but this made me curious about whether there s an actual improvement in recording at that rate or not.Browsing around though the net it seems that recording at 96 khz wouldn t make much different compared to 44 or 48, and since these are still the audio standards,if someone wanted to render their projects for a cd or a dvd, they would eventually be downgraded. SO what is the actual point of having an audio interface that can support up to 192khz if there s no actual benefit with it, is it only marketing?

 

Last edited: May 25, 2022

192 kHz - that is what the technicians measured, you are certainly trying to present your product a little better than it is.
Anyone who makes and sells a product will explain its advantages and not mention the disadvantages.
Actually none of them work with 192 kHz but at most with 96 kHz, the most popular is 48 kHz.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2021

I've got many girls back to my place with the promise of experiencing audio at 192 kHz!

 

192? Pff, how about 384 khz like "audiophile" players' manufacturers like fiio advertise? that's just business of getting our money out of our pockets if we're not technically savvy or lazy to google information or lack critical thinking. 48 khz is enough to represent all audible frequencies for human beings, and 96 khz is only useful for some mixing engineers. 192 is ovekill, 384 is just hilarious.

 

There is actually a case where recording in 192 kHz makes sense:
Sound Design.
A sample that has been recorded at a very high sample rate (96 khz+) can be pitched down much further without or at least much lesser artifacts. Note that you also need to have a mic that is capable of recording such high frequencies. There are special microphones that can record up to 384 khz that get used for that purpose.

If you want you can try to record a cymbal f.e. at 44,1 khz and at 192 khz and pitch it down 4 octaves and compare.
Your microphone will be the compromising factor here.

Alternatively if you have a vst synth that can run in 192 khz you can create a sound, sample it and pitch it down multiple times.

This is very common practice with sound designers - hence a lot of high quality sample libraries are sampled in 96 khz to give the designers the most possible resolution.

Cheers

 

44 khz is also only marketing, and so is more than 4 tracks.

 

not to speak of digitally generated material, because for that in opposite toADCs, there is no negative effect at all which had to be taken into account.

 

Think of it just like the high frame rate slo mo mode on a dslr. If you're planning to do serious time stretching or spectral editing then a higher sample rate might help. But the Nyquist limit is the mathematical value under which any waveform can be perfectly reconstructed from a limited number of samples, and Nyquist = sample rate / 2. That's why 44.1khz is still a standard, as it puts Nyquist at 22.05khz, which is above human hearing. Theoretically with high quality fft algos like you find in daws these days, there will be zero difference in quality for the vast majority of use cases.
Some people claim to use higher sample rates to get lower latency but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how latency works. Obviously if you push information through at twice the rate then you can get half the apparent latency at say 128 samples. But those 128 samples will only contain half the wave information than they would at the original sample rate, meaning you end up with the same latency but slightly higher CPU and bandwidth loads, i.e higher sample rates are invariably worse if you're looking for stable low latencies.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2021

Marketing and a hell of a lot of HDD space.

 

all the hits are 24-44

 

one of my professors at the university told me that there is one way to test an audio interface: make it record at it's max. if it records at 192khz and 24 bit, make an audio record of that... if there is any audible problem on the file, it is just marketing

 

here's an interesting article on the subject - although the author only briefly mentions 192khz, the concepts discussed are still valid.

https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/high-sampling-rates-sonic-benefit/

 

Supporting 192khz is a big deal since you can process audio up to that samplerate. For example, if a plugin does not use oversampling internally, you can use your DAW's settings to get the 192khz quality out of that particular plugin. For some types of processing it makes no difference, but for some others (e.g saturation, ambience, limiting) it is night and day difference when you compare 44.1 or even 96 to 192.

(Recording / listening to audio at 192khz vs lower samplerates is a totally different discussion.)

 

I find that this video is the absolute best explanation as to why high-resolution signals are useless for listening purposes :

However it is a different story for production. Running your setup at high sample rates avoids running into problems caused by analog anti-aliasing filters (which are very minimal, but it's just best practice to avoid any), provides plugins more range of THD before aliasing can be heard, and diminishes latency for plugins that have a fixed amount of samples for delay.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2021

What Are Audio Bit Depth & Sample Rates, and What do the Numbers Actually Mean?

 

Practically all that is relevant in music ends up in 16/24 @44.1.
Since I'm in remastering job, I can assure you that there is a huge unused quality space in 24/44.1. Every day I meet and correct numerous mistakes of all kinds made in that format and I can make a published recording (even by renowned labels) sound '20 years younger'.

 

Some of the correct questions are:

• What are the differences between low end/affordable audio devices?
• What are the differences between mid level audio devices?
• What are the differences between high end audio devices?
• What are the differences between very high end audio devices?
• How accurate are the converters and clocks in the lower to high end devices compared to the very high end devices?
• How much audio detail is retained or loss at various sample rates amongst one category or, between different categories?

The internal sound chip on my computer does 192kHz very well. Would not use it for serious work though. It is set at that rate so that any audio being converted to analog for the powered monitors has as much bandwidth as possible. Especially in the low end.

DAW is set at 48kHz, 24 bit.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2021

yes marketing, it has its benefits, so minor that I personally think it is not worth it because it takes a lot of other factors to consider especially how the end product is reproduced (listened). Not everyone has super high-end audiophile grade sound system and world class listening environment.

For tracking, in some case it will reduce a lot of latency for the trade of more HDD space and computing power, for sound design, it offers more flexibility in time-stretching, or maybe re-mastering job as mentioned above, the rest is just bragging right "I record, mix, and master this at 192kHz and mix it with Acustica plugin".

If you are a songwriter, just focus the time, energy and effort for the songwriting and other production thing because 100% of the time, a properly written song with a little less fidelity is a better than sparkling, shinning, spacy, heavenly, airy.. 192kHz Hi-Fi shite.

 

Bigger is better?