drewfx1
But for processing, it is most definitely beneficial to do certain types of operations at higher rates. In a perfect world, all plugins that benefited from this would upsample internally where desirable, and many do indeed do exactly this.
 
But there are some synths and FX that some people use that really should upsample internally but don't. So if one of those plugs is being used, running Sonar at higher sampling rates can provide real benefits.

Can you please elaborate a bit more on this, namely the benefits?

deswind
I am confused as to why a higher sample rate does not provide higher resolution?  If I take 12 samples per second.  It will sound very grainy and choppy, like looking at a very slow fan.  At one point does that graininess and choppiness go away?

Higher sample rates do provide higher resolution, but if that higher resolution is beyond the upper frequency humans can hear, then what's the point?  The choppiness goes away, or rather there is no choppiness (i.e. when the signal is reconstructed through the DAC) for all frequencies which are less than half the sampling frequency.
 
So..."Do you record at higher than 44.1KHz, and if so, why?" :-)
 
I could record at 28KHz these days...

drewfx1

mike_mccue
It seems like a time stretch system could use oversampling when it's time to time stretch.
 
Just saying.

Yes indeed.


But if the authors of the time stretching algorithm didn't bother to do this (for whatever reason), it does make sense to either run the process at a higher sampling rate or else use a different time stretching algorithm that already does what it should.

I've been wondering how I would learn if the time stretch processes that I know of use oversampling behind the scenes.
 
I've read comments about higher sampling rates and time stretch before and thought perhaps it might be the most compelling reason to run at higher rates. I'm not concerned about making fireworks sound like whale songs, but it would be nice to be able to make small timing tweaks to a hammer dulcimer* part and get better results than I sometimes get with the tools I have been using at 44.1kHz. It made me wonder if behind the scenes oversampling was already making it a best case scenario or if I could improve my work flow to improve the sound.
 
I asked the question yesterday but there have been no responses.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com...sampling-m3121307.aspx
 
 
 
*fixed

Well John it sounds like you must be knowledgeable bro so I'll take your word for it.  I'm no geek, I'm a musician.  However, for whatever reason, I've found that doing destructive editing at lower sample rates sometimes left some nasty artifacts that I rarely encounter nowadays.  As disk space is cheap it makes sense to use higher sampling rates- even if it just makes ya feel good!  ...and yeah man I can't record at both 44 and 48 at the same time.  I meant one or the other.  ...my bad! 

here ya go:

(from http://cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/n351/notes09/MM01-Analog-digital.html via google)
what i know is that if i have 100 audio tracks to mix, i will get a better mix with higher resolution :)
and whether craig meant it or not, it really is in the maths - if not then why, for example, bother with the 64bit mix engine?

lawp
here ya go:

(from http://cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/n351/notes09/MM01-Analog-digital.html via google)
what i know is that if i have 100 audio tracks to mix, i will get a better mix with higher resolution :)
and whether craig meant it or not, it really is in the maths - if not then why, for example, bother with the 64bit mix engine?

There is a good reason to use either the 32 bit FP or the 64 bit FP audio engine for processing. With them the artifacts that results from processing are placed in the very lowest area of the signal because you have near infinite levels practically speaking. 32 or 64 bit FP audio bit depth has nothing to do with sample rate. The real advantage with those bit depths is floating point not so much the bit count. One reason its very hard to clip FP audio inside Sonar.   
 
This thread is about sample rate not bit depth. 
 
What people forget about music and sound is most of the sound is in the low to mid range not way up near 20 kH .
 
Most of the energy used to produce sound resides in the lowest part of the spectrum not in the mid or upper reaches. Any casual look at a spectrum analyzer with show this as volume level. It usually has a distinct downward slope going toward the highs. What we need to look at for fidelity is how well we can reproduce those frequencies that have the most importance in the performance. Clear transparent highs give us the feeling of air and space. However, look at the spectrum of an MP3, it will have a cutoff at around 15 kH. I know that I can't tell whether something is a high bit rate MP3 or a 24 bit wav file, normally.
 
    
 
 

lawp
and whether craig meant it or not, it really is in the maths - if not then why, for example, bother with the 64bit mix engine?

Because people who don't really understand the math can be easily convinced that a bigger number automatically gives better results even when it doesn't. 

lawp
here ya go:

(from http://cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/n351/notes09/MM01-Analog-digital.html via google)

 
That link is written by someone who has absolutely no clue about how sampling works.

dimelives1

drewfx1
But for processing, it is most definitely beneficial to do certain types of operations at higher rates. In a perfect world, all plugins that benefited from this would upsample internally where desirable, and many do indeed do exactly this.
 
But there are some synths and FX that some people use that really should upsample internally but don't. So if one of those plugs is being used, running Sonar at higher sampling rates can provide real benefits.

Can you please elaborate a bit more on this, namely the benefits?

Craig (Anderton) had a long thread a while back on this (that got similarly sidetracked like this one!) after he found that some synths/effects sounded better when run at a higher rate.
 
Basically some, but not all, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) benefits from being done at higher sampling rates. Anything that produces overtones higher than one half the sampling rate will alias and sound somewhere between "ugly" and "less smooth" at a lower rate. 
 
So if a synth or effect that would benefit from this doesn't oversample internally (as many of us would argue it should), then running Sonar at a higher rate can improve things. In my case, everything I use that would benefit from oversampling happens to already do so internally, so there's no benefit to me. 
 
I would suspect that older stuff - written when CPU power was less abundant - would be more likely to not oversample internally. 

Already this thread is rehashing epic threads of old so I checked the OP again to be sure, which echoes the thread title of greater than 96kHz. Much of my opinion is already in this thread, and I would never even consider this for the following reasons:

1. Unless effects, synths, etc. are scripted to process the data (the software/process comments made above), nothing can be gained from feeding it more. Most do not disclose what they process internally anyway, so I personally doubt many (if any at all) are written to process >96kHz.
2. The system resources consumed can get out of hand quickly, especially chaining processes which can process every sample.
3. What is to be gained from such? The core frequencies (and even harmonics in most cases) are <11kHz for most instruments, with pianos and synths being a notable exception. The human ear responds best to ~3KHz, and even a piccolo's fundamentals straddle this (http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm). An interesting game is to high pass something at 10K and listen/play with just that region (sort of eye-opening actually).
4. The ultrasonic discussion has validity to some extent, and cells can respond to higher frequencies provided enough power is delivered (as this is done in a medical application, but with very specific equipment); however, 1) I do not believe programs are designed to process such frequencies in the first place, and 2) speakers capable of playing such (at the proper power) are required.