Advantages in producing with higher rates than 48khz?
Hi folks
As the topic says, is there any real advantage in producing with higher rates than 48 khz, especially for an edm producer?
In what rates do you guys produce?
What also bothers me: when i change my sample rate in the bounce process in Ableton (lets say from 48khz to 44.1), some of my sound-samples get lost in the bounce process (like some specific claps or effects). Can anyone explain that to me? Normally stuff should get up- or downsampled, right?
sorry for my bad english and thx for any response!
Nothing that you will hear. Industry standard is 44.1khz anyway and there is no reason to go any higher. Some audiophiles will tell you different, but audiophiles also say that gold connectors on an optical cable is beneficial to the sound
There’s usually very little benefit of sample rates higher than 48kHz. Heck I don’t even recommend using 48k if you’re going to be using 44.1 in the end anyway. Save yourself the unneccesary SRC and just work at 44.1kHz.
No idea why Live is losing your samples when you render at a difference sample rate though, I’ve never even heard of that before. MIght be worth contacting support@ableton.com if you have a set that you can reproduce this with everytime.
There have been articles where they talked about the advantages of using higher bit rates and how they can (sometimes, but not always) lead to better sound.
The short of it is using say 24/96 is going to give you a lot lower noise floor than 16/44.1 - assuming your equipment is up to it.
Keep in mind that hard drive space and computer speeds are constantly improving - why not produce at a higher rate and downsample like the pros?
BTW, there is a push to distribute music in general at higher than 16/44.1 - something that has been around since the CD was introduced 35 years ago.
The bit rate is where your noise floor is going to be, not the sample rate… 32 bit is the way to go for best noise floor using current tech, but 96? Yeah, the dogs might hate you for that, but a human will never notice.
The human ear cannot hear anything above 22khz. The average person over 25 cannot hear anything over 16khz. Utilizing the higher levels of the spectrum is bonkers. You get into sound modification and engineering at that point.
The one benefit is in dealing with aliasing. If you have sounds that extend past the sample rate in the digital world, it can result in aliasing - frequency spikes at lower frequencies then the fundamental frequency. This is why some plugins offer oversampling, to double, quadruple, etc the sample rate prior to processing so that aliasing is removed or minimized, then re-converting the sample rate back down to the project sample rate.
Maybe I’m just a fanboy, but if Tarekith says there’s no advantage, I’d go with his opinion. He’s a professional mastering engineer with much better ears than me…
Most gear that might alias these days oversamples internally anyway, so usually that’s not an issue. There’s a few plug ins where that might be an issue, so there’s definitely some times higher sample rates have their place.
