If you try to use empiricism when it comes to certain groups audiophiles, you are going to be sorely reminded that it's basically the equivalent of healing crystals for a different type of person. 24/192 is useful for mixing/mastering, but completely unnecessary for the end product to distribute for listening.

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evo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. Running at 44khz loses noticeable high-end content.

Most modern digital synths have already caught onto this and run internally at much higher sampling rates even if their output gets downsampled, but sometimes you run across a vintage plugin that runs at the host audio rate and working in a higher sampling rate is audible.

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Blackthorn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can generate perfect band-limited sawtooth waves at 44.1khz, there are multiple techniques for doing this and most production digital synthesizers use them.

Oversampling gives you headroom for aliases for the rest of the synth that is more vulnerable to it.

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evo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, I was oversimplifying a blit, the raw waveforms are usually okay, but I distinctly remember old-school VSTs where you couldn't achieve a nice saw lead at 44.1.

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Blackthorn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's tough to tell without specific names, but I imagine a lot of particularly old* VSTs were written to use naive sawtooths rather than perfect band-limited ones, which would have terrible aliasing at 44.1 khz. Oversampling those would help a lot!

* Some people are still making this mistake, despite information on the (many) ways to do it the right way being widely and freely available!

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evo an hour ago | parent [-]

I wonder if there's also distortion or ring modulation stages where some of the energy above hearing range might spill into audible sidebands if they're not nyquist-limited first.

	▲	Blackthorn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, that's the "rest of the synth" part that's more vulnerable to aliasing. There's some ways to do band-limited distortion but...they aren't nearly as widespread, easy, or universal as band-limited oscillators. Ring modulation is funny though because you'd ideally want the sidebands to modulate down by default rather than filter them out, that's why you're using it.

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dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No synth generates sawtooths by literally drawing a saw tooth in PCM. The distorsion you get if you do that is not subtle at all.

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colmmacc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

32-bits are great for recording too because they do an incredible job of capturing the dynamic range without having to be precise on the preamp settings. It removes an entire job from the recording workflow.

192 for mixing and mastering can be useful especially if you're doing a lot of effects, especially anything that pitch shifts. But I've seen low quality phone-microphone recordings make it to the master; if you capture lightning in a bottle, it hardly matters what the settings were, what the microphone was, or anything else.

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tshaddox 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They literally sell actual crystals that you’re supposed to place on top of speakers and amplifiers to make them sound better.

	▲	Blackthorn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We had a really nice crystal decoration that I happened to put on top of one of my TV speakers and, wouldn't you know it, it had this resonant frequency somewhere around specific human speech frequencies that drove us absolutely bonkers until I figured out the cause and moved it.

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Aldipower 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even with mixing/mastering 96khz is enough for persisting to files. But as another commenter said, 192 is useful, if you bend and stretch samples!