Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill wrote:
Not wanting to start a discussion about sample rate, but..
Again, on rec.audio.pro, it was mostly agreed that sample rates above
44.1 or 48 doesn't yield anything, other than you her the drive more ;) I'll look for a link to that discussion..
Well, you just started it ;)
Without wanting to go into too much detail here, I'd like to point out a few
items regarding sample rates here:
As you (most probably) all know, the human ear can only hear up to about
16kHz (depending a lot on age and possible abuse), with some people able to
hear up to about 20kHz (and I don't want to discuss precise values here, so
if these values are in your opinion not correct, this will not affect the
text about to follow...).
However, these values rely to stimuli with sine waves. Other experiments
however lead to the conclusions that:
1. the human ear can hear and discern properties in transients which
correspond to fourier transforms of above 20kHz
2. the human ear can detect phase relationships on a scale smaller
than 1/20kHz in the time domain
What do we need this for? (1) is used a lot for defining the characteristics
of the sound. (2) is vitally important in directional hearing.
Furthermore, we got the issue with the anti-aliasing filters, which due to
their nature are NOT brickwalls at the Nyquist frequency (in case of a CD
22.05kHz).
So taking all of that into consideration, I can see (not that I actually did
listening tests here) that it may very well be possible that there is an
advantage of 96kHz over 48kHz - other than loading my computer.
Rainer
This is common belief, often debated and not holding water.
That we under very ideal conditions might be able to detect freqs higher than 20Khz may be proven true, but AFAIK has never proven by experiments related to music, even not by blind tests on Golden Ear test subjects.
I don't have links to docs derived in tightly controlled labs proving claims in either direction, which is often the case in such discussions.
However, as most even halfways adults can hardly detect freqs above ~14 Khz, I find it mostly irrelevant for practical music production, even when using near state of art equipment.
WRT the Shannon and Nyquist criteria, stating frequencies reproducable up to half the sampling rate, provided infinitely steep anti-aliasing filters are used, this used to be a big problem in older days when using analog filters, but is not the case with todays 64x oversampling and digital filters.
I'm sure some will say 96 (or 192Khz) sounds much better, and wil not argue that. However, it was mathematically proven on rec.audio.pro the difference is hardly there. Further, certain interfaces actually does sound better/cleaner/whatever at higher sample rates, which is simply due to inadequate electronics desighns.
Please note: I honestly didn't mean to start such a discussion, merely point out that if we assume 48Khz is enough, dealing with a more than decent numbers of track over firewire400 shouldn't be a problem.
--
rgds,
van Sinn
