Are we missing out by not recording our music at really high sample rates like 96 kHz or 192 kHz?<\/p>\n
Gear manufacturers make us think that we need the most power gear and highest sample rates to “unlock” pro sounding home studio recordings…. but is this really true? Can we actually benefit sonically from recording at these really high sample rates? Is recording at higher sample rates what separates a pro recording from an amateur one?<\/p>\n
All these answers and more are below – and if you don’t want to read, jump down to the video!<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s start by talking about what sample rate is:<\/p>\n Sample rate is the number of times we \u201csample\u201d a continuous soundwave per second. The standard for audio is 44.1 kHz sample rate, which means 44,100 samples are measured for every second of audio being recorded. And when I say measured, all I mean is that we will record what the amplitude is for the audio signal.<\/p>\n Now there are so many misconceptions about sample rates being \u201cbetter\u201d or producing more accurate sound, but those are largely false. A 44.1 khz and 96 khz sample rate file will accurately capture all the frequencies that us humans can hear which is from about 20 – 20khz. You might think that if we can sample the audio waves at more spots, that we would be able to reconstruct the waveform better in this hearing range\u2026. But that isn\u2019t true at all. Not one bit.<\/p>\n This is because of something called the Shannon Nyquist theorem, which tells us that we can PERFECTLY – yep, perfectly reconstruct any band limited audio signal as long as we sample the audio greater than 2X the highest frequency. So if you want to perfectly reconstruct a 20 khz sine wave, you need to sample it greater than 40 khz. The math is pretty intense and completely beyond the scope of this video.<\/p>\n In more nerdy terms, anytime we sample audio greater than twice the highest frequency, there is only one unique solution to connect all the data points together.<\/p>\nWhat is Sample Rate?<\/h1>\n
Common Misconceptions About Sample Rate and Audio<\/h1>\n