88.2

dav nagle

The quality difference between 88.2 and 44.1 is huge. I am never going back. What do my friends on here think?

sei046

As a 44.1 24bit man im interested in hearing some discussion.

danjokill

dav nagle wrote: »

The quality difference between 88.2 and 44.1 is huge. I am never going back. What do my friends on here think?

hell yeah .... i agree, even 48khz i can hear the difference

studiorat

yup yup!
doesn't quite eat hard drives like 96k either

dav nagle

I always wanted a Mac pro to record at a higher sample rate and so I got one. Then I got advised to stick with 44.1 and heard all the reasons why to, so I did. If you set up a couple of mics and sing a song and play the guitar the difference in the vocal definition is huge. For me its the difference between singing into a plastic bag and singing into a silk sheet. Never again.

ogy

i presume you mean recording at 88.2 and mixing back down to 44.1 is better than recording at 44.1?

yeh the antialiasing filter isnt gonna be operating anywhere near the audible range, i think that makes a big difference.

also with going from 88.2 to 44.1 as opposed to 96 to 44.1 seems like there would be a lot less truncation and distortion at final mixdown

sei046

Surely singing into a silk sheet would sound terrible aswell. You would loose so much high end!

dav nagle

sei046 wrote: »

Surely singing into a silk sheet would sound terrible aswell. You would loose so much high end!

Not if it had a low pass filter :eek:

PaulBrewer

I think there's little doubt that 88.2 sounds a good deal better than 44.1.

There's also a line of opinion that 44.1 is more 'rock' sounding...

However there are some downsides with 88.2 and higher frequencies -

Storage, as da 'Rat mentioned. Perhaps less of an issue than it was even a year or 18 months ago. The price is dropping fast. Still, everything becomes at least twice the size.

Even with a hd3 rig it doesn't take a whole heap of tracks before she'll start slowing, add a pile of edits and crossfades and it will effect performance.

Some guys think the gain sonically is so small it doesn't warrant making the session a pain in the whole to do.....

teamdresch

Depends on the players/genre.

Good players, not too many overdubs get 88.2
Players or genres that I expect to require a high plugin count or a lot of processing to sound right I'll tend to stick to 44.1
I've also done a few bits and bobs with bands that have very very long songs, so I'll tend to stick with 44.1 with them either way.

indough

my sp1200 samples at 22KHz in 12bit

danjokill

ogy wrote: »

i presume you mean recording at 88.2 and mixing back down to 44.1 is better than recording at 44.1?

yeh the antialiasing filter isnt gonna be operating anywhere near the audible range, i think that makes a big difference.

also with going from 88.2 to 44.1 as opposed to 96 to 44.1 seems like there would be a lot less truncation and distortion at final mixdown

Where is the conversion happening in the chain?

iquinn

Anecdotaly, some gear, converters/pluggins work better at higher sample rates. Others work just as well at 44.

i think it depends on the context and worth trying out for yourself.

i've done tests myself, processing a stereo mix using a small amount of pluggins and going through some outboard, so there was an AD/DA process.
I did 3 differnet songs, the original mixes were 24bit/48k, I did each session at 24bit/88k and then at 24/44k.
The final mix was then converted to 16/44, as that's what normally happens...

The results were...well, inconclusive, i thought one track sounded better from the 44k session, the others just sounded slightly different to each other, neither better or worse though, just different.

The test was really to see if working at higher rates produced a better sounding mix with regard to my own way of working and not really about recording at higher rates....

But as a result, I now work mostly at 24bit/64k....as I found there doesn't seem to be much, if any, difference once you go past that rate.

As most things audio, it's horses for courses and worth experimenting with your own set-up to see if you think it's making an improvement.