[LAU] Record at 44.1 or at 48 kHz?

[tim hall]

Victor Roetman wrote:

> The question I have is whether I should be recording 24 bit audio at
> 44.1 kHz or at 48 kHz if the end result will be Compact Disk audio.  

I'm not an expert on this, but:
CD audio is 44.1kHz/16bit
If you record at anything else, you will have to downsample.

> It
> seems that some pro-audio equipment tends to prefer 48 kHz, and many
> people do their recording at 48 kHz.  The heart of the question is this:
> Will the slight slight increase in quality of recording and mixing at 48
> kHz outweigh the slight reduction in quality from re-sampling 48 kHz to
> 44.1 kHz?
> 
> How about if the project was also using loops recorded at 44.1 kHz?  If
> the Ardour project is at 48 kHz, the loops would need to be up-sampled,
> and then the whole thing down-sampled again to 44.1 on export.  Would
> that up-down sampling offset any benefit of using 48 kHz in the first place?

Probably, at a guess. You really want to organise things so you only 
have to downsample once, as the final stage of mastering as I understand 
it. This process is analogous to resizing a bitmap, you want to do all 
the composition work at the highest resolution and try to avoid 
resampling as much as possible.

cheers,

tim
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