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.