Poll: 48kHz vs 96kHz

[kap'n krunch]

Explain it to us.

really?...I wish you the best and may God/Mother Maria bless you and may you be happy---

 

[Sal1950]

SSD is not really good for storage like that. You will wear it out.
You are much better off with a RAID5 of HDDs... after all, 8TB is nothing, my WD Reds are 10TB each! I just upgraded two of my NAS... so now I'm running 110TB of online NAS at home.
I only use SSDs as the system drives in the user host machines.

Wear it out, nah I highly doubt that. I have a 64GB OCZ Vertex (original design) I bought in 2008 to use for my Linux OS, and it ran constantly that way till 1 year ago when it became too small for the OS root & minimal home partitions. It's still in the system used for odds & ends storage with no issues. I only have one tower and I want it as silent as possible. After the next upgrade the CPU and power supply will go fanless and the box will be dead quiet. I keep an outboard 12TB spinner for backups of all my music and video, done the old fashion way, with manual rsync terminal commands. It only gets powered up when I deam it time to run the backups.

 

[ssully]

So the sound of a violin played live, unamplified, is worse than one recorded digitally with limited bandwidth? I guess that's subjective, but inarguably, the non-bandlimited live performance is more "natural." A higher sample rate will get you closer to that live performance, assuming everything in the chain has bandwidth to match.

It's depressing to think how many times such misconceptions have been corrected on audio forums in my lifetime. But anyway.

You aren't hearing any of those ultrasonics when you listen to a live violin. Neither are you hearing them when you listen to a recording of it at 96kHz or whatever hi rez rate. Because you aren't a bat. Your cannot hear frequencies above ~22kHz even when your ears were at their youngest/healthiest.

It is no more necessarily to capture those frequencies than would be to capture wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, if you made a video of that violin performances.

If you *hear* something from your playback system when it's playing ultrasonic frequency content, it is distortion in the audible range caused by the presence of content your playback system was not designed to handle. Hence, a negative. Fortunately that rarely happens since the content usually has to be fairly high energy to do such damage.

And btw, in air, ultrasonic content at realistic levels (produced , say, by playing a violin) hardly travels well enough for you to hear even if you could hear it. Air acts as a low pass filter for ultrasonic waves travelling to your ear.

 

[bluelightning]

It's depressing to think how many times such misconceptions have been corrected on audio forums in my lifetime. But anyway.

You aren't hearing any of those ultrasonics when you listen to a live violin. Neither are you hearing them when you listen to a recording of it at 96kHz or whatever hi rez rate. Because you aren't a bat. Your cannot hear frequencies above ~22kHz even when your ears were at their youngest/healthiest.

It is no more necessarily to capture those frequencies than would be to capture wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, if you made a video of that violin performances.

If you *hear* something from your playback system when it's playing ultrasonic frequency content, it is distortion in the audible range caused by the presence of content your playback system was not designed to handle. Hence, a negative. Fortunately that rarely happens since the content usually has to be fairly high energy to do such damage.

And btw, in air, ultrasonic content at realistic levels (produced , say, by playing a violin) hardly travels well enough for you to hear even if you could hear it. Air acts as a low pass filter for ultrasonic waves travelling to your ear.

Great explanation! It is indeed amazing how many times these same myths must be debunked.

 

[tonyE]

Wear it out, nah I highly doubt that. I have a 64GB OCZ Vertex (original design) I bought in 2008 to use for my Linux OS, and it ran constantly that way till 1 year ago when it became too small for the OS root & minimal home partitions. It's still in the system used for odds & ends storage with no issues. I only have one tower and I want it as silent as possible. After the next upgrade the CPU and power supply will go fanless and the box will be dead quiet. I keep an outboard 12TB spinner for backups of all my music and video, done the old fashion way, with manual rsync terminal commands. It only gets powered up when I deam it time to run the backups.

You are using your SSD as a host disk, which is usually a low IO mechanism with mostly random access of small files. Very little write amplification in that use. That's why I also use SSDs in such applications.

But for full blown media servers, and anything using a parity drive, you do NOT want to use solid state storage. Specially if you use record stuff into them often. You see, the issue with Flash storage is that it is ALWAYS writing as it maintains the storage. The electronic charge in the cells decays over time so it must do a read/erase/program cycle. So, if you have lot of big files you are gonna have lots of read/erase/program cycles just standing there. And if you shut them down you run the risk of entropy.

In a host machine, the files are smaller and are updated much more often (OK, not the application but the associated data files). So there will be a nice distribution of reads (for the binary program files) and read/erase/write for the configuration and data files. And since they are smaller, there is less risk of write amplification. Still, be careful with entropy.

Turns out the safest archival place for flash is wrapped in non static and foil and stashed in your freezer!

12TB? How much data do you have anyhow? Video files get huge... and lossless, uncompressed 24/96 audio get very large as well.

 

[JediJoker]

You aren't hearing any of those ultrasonics when you listen to a live violin.

I'm not suggesting that, but they affect sound waves within the audible spectrum, affecting what one does hear.

 

[Soundfield]

IAnd btw, in air, ultrasonic content at realistic levels (produced , say, by playing a violin) hardly travels well enough for you to hear even if you could hear it. Air acts as a low pass filter for ultrasonic waves travelling to your ear.

It isn't that severe. The attenuation of air at 30kHz is about 0.5dB /m. If it were really bad those old ultrasonic remote controls wouldn't have worked! There is precious little ultrasonic output from a violin though. Its highest note, E7, is just 2,367Hz - so you'd have to go to the tenth harmonic before you saw anything entering into the ultrasonic region even from that note!

 

[JediJoker]

There is precious little ultrasonic output from a violin though. Its highest note, E7, is just 2,367Hz - so you'd have to go to the tenth harmonic before you saw anything entering into the ultrasonic region even from that note!

OK, a violin was a bad example... Something with a higher range and rich with overtones.

 

[Soundfield]

OK, a violin was a bad example... Something with a higher range and rich with overtones.

I doubt any produce any significant ultrasonic output. The highest pitched acoustic musical instrument is probably lower in frequency than you think. Amongst orchestral instruments it is the Piccolo which has a max playable note of 5,000Hz (only four or five harmonics away from the ultrasonic region)!

 

[barfle]

I know that 96/24 exceeds my abilities to hear details, but I don’t know about everyone else, so when I can get that resolution, that’s what I get. Storage is cheap, but no sense in wasting it, or in paying for goofy stuff over that point.

A lot of CDs sound great, and lots of MP3s sound great, too. IMNSHO, what goes into the encoder is at least as important as the characteristics of the encoder. Weakest link and all that.

 

[tonyE]

OK, a violin was a bad example... Something with a higher range and rich with overtones.

A drum set played by Ringo Starr high on quaaludes and cheap beer?

 

[bluelightning]

I'm not suggesting that, but they affect sound waves within the audible spectrum, affecting what one does hear.

No. They do not change anything in the audible spectrum. They change the shape of the waveform, but not in the audible spectrum. For that matter you could argue that every frequency well past 20Khz changes the shape of the waveform when observed with infinite bandwidth, but that does not mean they translate to anything within the audible spectrum.

 

[JediJoker]

No. They do not change anything in the audible spectrum. They change the shape of the waveform, but not in the audible spectrum. For that matter you could argue that every frequency well past 20Khz changes the shape of the waveform when observed with infinite bandwidth, but that does not mean they translate to anything within the audible spectrum.

Sound from ultrasound is a thing.

 

[marpow]

I voted 96Khz.
My experience as others have said we get what we get with physical discs. When I purchase download music I always buy the highest rate available even up to 192, DSD x2, etc. It all sounds good to me and I assume when I pay a few dollars more for lets say 192 over 96, I am positive my Placebo effect is working well.
Now for all you in the booth fellas, leave me out.

 

[bluelightning]

Sound from ultrasound is a thing.

This article is nothing more than a basic concept of non linearity. Sure, when two tones get mixed in a non linear medium you will get the sum and difference terms and their harmonics or whatever based on the transfer function. That does not apply or very minimally does in reference to acoustic instruments played in free space. What non linearity are you experiencing there ? It is different story if you are creating electronic music/intentionally distorting and want to retain harmonics.

 

[JediJoker]

Sure, when two tones get mixed in a non linear medium you will get the sum and difference terms and their harmonics or whatever based on the transfer function. That does not apply or very minimally does in reference to acoustic instruments played in free space. What non linearity are you experiencing there ? It is different story if you are creating electronic music/intentionally distorting and want to retain harmonics.

Right, so if in any circumstance, ultrasound is generated as part of a performance—live or in studio, acoustic or electronic—then that ultrasound could affect the audible result. If everything in the chain has the bandwidth to capture and reproduce a portion of that ultrasound—in this case, up to the 96kHz sampling Nyquist of 48kHz—without unwanted side effects, then why not take advantage of the ability?

But really, the biggest benefit of playing back higher sample rates for an end user is the use of less steep reconstruction filters. Phase linearity is of greater concern than ultrasonic content.

 

[Sal1950]

12TB? How much data do you have anyhow? Video files get huge... and lossless, uncompressed 24/96 audio get very large as well.

The 12TB drive is for backup, it's about half full now.
I don't store much video, I'm a 95% music guy.
I have about 10 movies and 25 concerts on the drives, the rest is all music
Multich flac DVDA, BD and SACD files are getting bigger and bigger.
Around 4,500 albums are in my library, none lower SQ than ripped CD lossless flacs.
That adds up to right at 6TB of stored music data.
That's nuttin honey, I'm a small timer conpared to some here. LOL

 

[par4ken]

Right, so if in any circumstance, ultrasound is generated as part of a performance—live or in studio, acoustic or electronic—then that ultrasound could affect the audible result. If everything in the chain has the bandwidth to capture and reproduce a portion of that ultrasound—in this case, up to the 96kHz sampling Nyquist of 48kHz—without unwanted side effects, then why not take advantage of the ability?

But really, the biggest benefit of playing back higher sample rates for an end user is the use of less steep reconstruction filters. Phase linearity is of greater concern than ultrasonic content.

That is an idea that has been floating around forever, it even sounds plausible to me. I don't think that it has ever been proven nor disproven. Likewise the use of less steep reconstruction filters should also have a positive effect.

I would hope that all here would at least agree that while high sample rates such as 96 and 192 kHz might be overkill, their use can only have positive effects (at worse no effect). With hard drive space so cheap and plentiful these days the only good reason to down sample or use lower rates is for system compatibility.

 

[Fourplay]

It's depressing to think how many times such misconceptions have been corrected on audio forums in my lifetime. But anyway.

You aren't hearing any of those ultrasonics when you listen to a live violin. Neither are you hearing them when you listen to a recording of it at 96kHz or whatever hi rez rate. Because you aren't a bat. Your cannot hear frequencies above ~22kHz even when your ears were at their youngest/healthiest.

It is no more necessarily to capture those frequencies than would be to capture wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, if you made a video of that violin performances.

If you *hear* something from your playback system when it's playing ultrasonic frequency content, it is distortion in the audible range caused by the presence of content your playback system was not designed to handle. Hence, a negative. Fortunately that rarely happens since the content usually has to be fairly high energy to do such damage.

And btw, in air, ultrasonic content at realistic levels (produced , say, by playing a violin) hardly travels well enough for you to hear even if you could hear it. Air acts as a low pass filter for ultrasonic waves travelling to your ear.

I may not be able to hear ultrasonics, but I hear what you are saying in your explanation. So my question to you specifically (and others may feel free to respond, particularly those who have been unimpressed with 96K): is there any circumstance where you believe that 24/96 is a better method of capture than say 24/48? If so, please specify under what circumstances you would choose the higher sampling method.

 

[Electric Moo]

I do 24/96 because that's the resolution I record at. Storage is cheap, why not keep it the same as the source?

In the future we may discover some things we don't yet understand about sound.