Some notes on 96khz: I tried working exclusively with 96Khz for about a month. The dynamic range is so extreme that the faintest of sounds are picked up. "Silence" no longer exists. ANYWHERE. Ladspa plugins like gates don't go below -70db, and they need to. A plus was I felt free to sell all my outboard compressors. My analog synths sounded fatter, voice more robust, but at least some of that was the result of turning my knobs down from "11" to give me 10DB or more of headroom. (I'd fallen into a bad habit) The 96Khz Bardsdown bosendorfer does sound awesome at 96khz (even though linuxsampler only does 16 bits, not 24). No background noises. I do use 96khz when I'm just playing piano, no vocals. I went nuts during this period quieting my studio, cutting various noise sources by about 8 db overall. (now saving up for a sound booth) I was still unsatisfied with listening directly to the 96KB recorded results - I could hear leaves in trees blowing outside (I don't exaggerate)... but the 44khz mixdowns were nice, all that extra stuff dropped out. I went back to straight 44khz/24 bit afterwards and although the sound seems "deader" I don't hear all that extra stuff all the time, and the savings in disk space and mixdown time are worth it. Note: I have a good ear (can hear up to 22khz in one ear - compensates for the other which doesn't go above 4k) So having hires audio is good for debugging your studio, and pure 96khz sound sources, but not so hot for development or analog work. The primary reason I remain interested in using it is to encode down higher quality surround. 192Khz strikes me as complete overkill, except perhaps in that instance. On 1/26/06, Florin Andrei <florin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 13:28 +0100, Carlo Capocasa wrote: > > > My question, how useful is 192kHz for practical purposes? How quickly is > > that likely to change? I'd really appreciate some advice here, thank you. > > It's a controversial issue, so be prepared to encounter many different > opinions. > > >From a practical standpoint, I believe that 192 is only rarely needed. > 96 should be just as good. It is not likely that the situation is going > to change in the near future. > You need extremely high-quality (and extremely expensive) components in > your audio chain to exploit the difference between 192 and 96. You also > need very good mixing and mastering skills in order to stay at the top > of the quality ladder. > > I would be much more worried about the bit depth - use 24bit instead of > 16 whenever possible throughout the processing chain. > > -- > Florin Andrei > > http://florin.myip.org/ > > -- Mike Taht PostCards From the Bleeding Edge http://the-edge.blogspot.com
