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Old Nov 5, 2019, 04:07 PM
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Jazz Paladin Jazz Paladin is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: Deciding whether to do Secret of Mana or Wild Arms for my next album
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To add to the confusion, there is a problem in that some streaming/digital platforms are going to starting to call "Hi-Res" 44/16 to differentiate from MP3 type files. Things that are a higher bit will be called "super hi-res". I believe this change is coming to a major platform such as Apple/iTunes in the near future, but I cannot for the life of me remember if it is indeed Apple or another of the major names that this change is coming to. But it IS one of the heavy-weights.

Personally, I can hear quite a difference between 44k/16 bit--Even when downsampling later on. But the problem from a mixing standpoint is often hard drive space, processing power. So these days I used 48/24 for recording.

But to be honest , here is the problem with any "differences" one might hear. First of all, you are not going to hear them if you have sub-par DA converters and speakers and lack a good listening environment.

Secondly, if you think about it, people simply cannot hear beyond 44.1 K --We are not dogs. And technically, the only reason we need anything beyond 22 KHZ has to do with something called Nyquist theory, since the best of us cannot hear beyond 20 K, the only reason we double this frequency has to do with making sure there is no inter-sampling conflict when you add more than 1 channel or speakers.

Third, when I stated above that I CAN hear differences between 44k and 88K, take into mind that what I mean by this can be summarized by a white paper published by Engineer Dan Kennedy well over a decade ago--since we cannot hear above 44.1k in stereo systems, any "differences" we are hearing most likely has to do with filtering roll-offs that are a bit more gentle of a slope as they creep into the audible bandwidth. When people say that they can hear more smooth high end detail in 96K, this is most likely what to attribute this sensation to.

The proposed cure is better filtering design for lower sampling frequencies, but many designers and listeners simply jump on the "higher is better" mentality, and don't focus on this as a solution very often.

I won't even talk about DSD , even though the concept has great merits...almost nobody has the capacity to mix an album on that stuff due to the sheer amount of processing power required, even some great studios. Most albums that were recorded in DSD eventually end up being converted to PCM since just adding a simple digital effect requires some crazy horsepower at such a high rate of sampling.
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Last edited by Jazz Paladin; Nov 5, 2019 at 04:35 PM.
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