44.1 vs 48 vs 88.2 vs 96

I know this has probably already been discussed before, maybe over a thousand times…

Now that I am almost ready to start recording (moving from the composition stage) I need a little help from the experienced users with this subject or those who are real audiophiles who can perceive maybe spiritual voices.

I have seen and heard a lot that you should just record @ 24 bit/44.1 simply because “It’s all just going to end up on CD anyway”, and that doesn’t really justify much to me.

What I really need to know is if during the mixing process of a song or working with an array of plugins at rates above the 44.1, is there a sonic difference while working with the audio? Do plugins sound better? Is mixing easier? Do eq’s respond better?

And then again, when I downsample the song to 44.1 will it really be reflected, or somehow it all gets readjusted as if I had done it directly at 44.1?

Some say you should record and work at 88.2 simply beacuse of the “theory” that it is double the frequency of 44.1 and the downsample should be smoother and better, I find that one a bit hard to believe, whether its precisely half (or even if you like give it the golden ratio), it’s still going through a resample process, just like when you probably scale an image…doesn’t matter if you’re doing it half or quarter, it still should look smooth at the end, I guess.

Then some say do it at 48000 simply because you do get a little extra headroom and you’re still not wasting drive space, and that you do hear a little more and better during the mix.

And then others (maybe 1%) say “If you consider yourself or want to become good at mixing, do it at 44.1” simply because the power of a good quality song lays on the mixing technique, not in all this computer nonsense, this last one did really mean a lot to me, so I would like to see your thoughts.

So let’s try to stick this maybe at 48000 vs 44100.

Can you really hear a difference WHEN WORKING at 48000 than 44100, mostly the mixing process, do those eq’s or plugins sound better?

And does it really reflect on the final resampled 44100 file?

Thanks to all.

Hi Joe,

For years now I’ve worked only at 44.1 because of the majority of stuff being mastered to CD.

Not once in any part of, recording, editing, mixing or mastering have I ever thought that the sample rate was a limiting factor in the quality of the recordings. What I mean by that is that usually an improvement in any one of:

  • the performance
  • mic choice / mic placement
  • editing skills
  • mixing skills
  • time available
    would have produced a vastly more noticeable difference in the final master than choosing to use a different Fs to start with.

I’m sure there are valid arguments for using other rates, but from my experiences so far, it hasn’t really mattered that much.

If it is a choice between 48k and 44.1k, do whatever the end result is going to be. If you are going to be doing a fair amount of processing, there can be a benefit to working at 96k or 88.2k depending on the processing algorithms involved. But honestly most of what i have worked on recently is still recorded at 44.1 or 48k, there isn’t to much of a difference.

  Seablade

I’ve seen several double blind studies that show that no one (normal folk and audio engineers) can tell the difference between 16/44.1, 24/96, and live source material.

Having said that, in a real studio environment, with good equipment, I track to 24/88.2, and mix to 24/88.2.

Thanks guys, just learning all this mixing thing which I’m still really a noob at, and just want to make sure I start with the right foot before getting to an important point of my progress and then find out I’ve been doing it all wrong.

@ seablade:

You said “there isn’t to much of a difference” when you record 44.1 or 48k, so in other words there is one, just not that much. What is this difference like, are they like ultra high frequencies? Is it worth it? And can you hear it during mixing or maybe eq-ing?

Thanks!

If anyone can hear the difference between 44.1 and 48, they’re either a genetically modified cat, or an alien.

@joegiampaoli

You will get more of a difference from the quality loss from resampling between 48k and 44.1 than you will hear from using those sample rates from the get go. In other words Ricardus is pretty close to dead on.

The reason for those sample rates has nothing to do with any difference in audio quality, but rather the difference in what they are being sync’d to. 44.1 was decided as it would allow for recordings covering the audio spectrum up to 22kHz, above the range of most people’s hearing if not everyone’s hearing. 48kHz was used for syncing to film, I can’t find a good article explaining exactly why and am not sure I could explain it very well from memory at the moment. The end destination should be the determining factor in choosing between those two formats only, so as to avoid resampling and any associated quality loss from it. Any benefit gained from working at 48kHz will be more than overshadowed by the slight loss in quality from the resampling process.

   Seablade

The reason 44.1 was chosen as the sampling frequency originally for CD audio (20-20Khz frequency response) was because at that time, the filters they built to cut frequencies above 20K needed a slope to work effectively, and could not simply kill everything above 20Khz. They needed to roll off the higher frequencies using the additional 4.1Khz. In an ideal world the sampling frequency for CD audio would only need to be 40Khz.

@Ricardus: The choice of 44.1KHz is also linked to the video field rate. In the early days of digital audio, hard disks had the required storage bandwidth to capture the audio but not the capacity, so video tape recorders were used to store the digital data. As such - an integer number of samples has to be contained in one video frame and so you end up with:

Field rate X Number of active lines X samples per line:

60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz for 60Hz video since there are 245 lines per field = 490 lines per frame

50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 KHz for 50Hz Video since there are 294 lines per field = 588 lines per frame

Numbers. If I wanted to see numbers I’d go back to school. (that was a paraphrase of a Beavis and Butthead quote). :slight_smile:

But @joegiampoli, record at 44.1 for now. It will be fine.

I work at 88.2 when I work digital because it’s a multiple of 44.1, and many of the mastering engineers I work with enjoy mastering at the higher sampling rates, and either resample algorithmically, or recapture the audio, analog, through a high-end set of converters, to bring it down to 44.1.

Mastering engineers who cut vinyl always prefer high-res masters to work with.

The other consideration in choosing sample rates has nothing to do with software. An A/D or D/A needs to be built well to achieve the theoretical noise and jitter specs. An industrial grade A/D at 16 bit, 44.1kHz may sound better than a consumer grade box at double the sample rate, because of things like how well the power supply is decoupled, grounding, etc. Even a lot of this stuff doesn’t matter as much as it used to, since a lot of stuff is monolitic ICs anymore.

There are a couple of paper advantages to high sample rates for CD - a lot of noise your DSP introduces (yes, it does) will be in the octave above the band of interest and will get filtered out during resampling. But the downside is it takes a lot more HP to do DSP at high sample rates - but even this isn’t much of a concern today.

So my take (as a mastering engineer) - as long as you don’t do anything too weird, the differences in sample rates won’t make as big a difference in the recording as having good or bad lyrics will! :wink:

Thanks guys, I’ve got a better understanding of all this now.

So I’ll just keep it simple and straightforward, I’ll just record and work on my mixes at 24/44100

Cheers!

Hi everybody

appart from the framerate “44,1; 48; 88,2; 96…”.

Can anyone tell me what the number of Bits is all about? The “Red Book” standard for CD is 16Bit/44,1kHz I tink. So if you are recording with 24 Bit everything would have to be resampled? Or not?

Im always recording with 16/44,1 cause I am afraid of resampling.

Sry for changing the topic. :slight_smile:

Well I do use 24 bit myself, two reasons:

  1. I do hear a very subtle difference when I record 24 vs 16, but this only affects certain instruments, not all, I did notice a fuller and richer sound in clean acoustic and electric guitars with overdrives and distortions, maybe some synths, a bit hard to explain, but I could hear more chimyness? and harmonics, and I did discover this when I started using Ardour, but the difference is very, very subtle, but I have not tested yet exporting both comparisons and see if there is a difference or is really reflected on the final file.

  2. I busted my butt pushing my M-Audio Fast Track Pro to run under 24 bits just for the heck of it under linux, it was really hard to achieve and I’m probably one of the first (maybe the first one) to do it (not to blow my horns and whistles), so I do it as a respect to my hard work.

I have seen and read a lot that mostly all studios do work with 24 bit or 32 floating, and then they just sample down to 16 bit for the CD.

I just wanted to know if there was such a difference doing all this 44.1, 48, … etc, that’s why this post.

Don’t worry about changing topic, I’d like to hear other opinions about your question.

So yes, I do hear a very, very small difference between 16 and 24 bit, but nothing out of this world, just on that high end of the range and only some instruments seem to show it.

Again it could just be me and my imagination…

Im using a Presonus FP10 with Firewire FFADO. And it works very very well.

When I’m home from work i think I’m gonna play around with Jack and Ardour, so maybe i can see/hear some effects on my recordings. Doesnt changing from 16 to 24 Bit influence your latency? I still dont know how Jack calculates it. BTW I never had problems with Xruns with my settings. So I left everything as it was.

When changing from 16 to 24 Bit dont you get much bigger files?

Guess I’ll have to learn some basix about recording and what all these numbers are about.

I use 48khz just because the jconv data files are at 48khz so i can use the wonderful Jconv reverb, even if my CPU hates me for it!

@Azeroth: I would say that the number of bits used is probably more important than choosing between 44.1, 48 or 88.2 etc sample rates. If you make sure the signal uses most of the available resolution then you probably won’t hear too much difference if you just record a file and listen to it back again. The main advantage comes when processing the audio.
I would recommend that you record at the highest resolution (probably 24Bits) - make sure the file is stored as a floating point file (especially if you bounce or export tracks etc) and only convert to 16Bits if or when you have to for CD. This means you keep the highest quality representation of the sound in digital form, so that when you apply processing to the audio you do not degrade it noticeably due to rounding errors etc.
There probably won’t be any effect on latency - JACK latency is expressed in frames or samples - so the actual sample ‘size’ shouldn’t affect it, its still ‘n’ samples latency. There maybe a small change in the ADC converter latency - the time taken for the soundcard to compute the sample value but this depends on the soundcard, the ADCs used etc. and the difference is normally not worth worrying about.

24 bits is like the “volume depth” of your recorded file: of course if you record everything close to 0 db you with your normal 16 bits you have 16 bits depth, but if you record on a lower level, or because you record something very dynamic, it can occur, that some silent parts will only have 8 bits depth… therefore it makes sense to use 24 bits…
As well I guess also for fadeouts: the normal digital fadeout with 16 bits has 2^16 steps from full volume to nothing. that sounds much, but you actually hear a “break” between very silent and nothing, because its logarithmic.
I think 24 bits always make sense… and also: you can t burn it down on cd with 24 bits(and the audio cd is a quite old standard for the digital world…), you can already encode your flac ´s with 24 bit…

linuxdsp is completely correct on all counts. Record in 24 bits for a number of reasons, but mostly because it makes a HUGE difference in noise floor in your recordings and ease in making sure you don’t clip while obtaining a decent noise floor. It will NOT affect your latency in any noticeable way(Meaning we are talking microseconds(much smaller than a milisecond) if that, maybe someone familiar with the hardware AD/DA design can comment here). Jack uses 32 bit floats internally anyways so you won’t be doing yourself any favors by limiting it really.

   Seablade

The “Head Room” has greatly improved around here:-}