What SAMPLE RATE Should You Record At? | Why HIGHER Can Be WORSE! 

Another fantastic video Mark! Marvellous work!

Learned more from you in a half hour than from my university audio engineering courses tried to explain over a week. Well explained and thanks for showing examples. People like me learn from seeing and hearing examples not just having definitions thrown at them 🤘🏼

The ONLY reason I use higher sample rate is for audio stretching. And it’s a rare occasion. Usually some sort of flown in sample that I want to stretch.

I love the comparison between audio and video!! This made both concepts click for me, as I enjoy videography and music production. Thank you 🙏🏾

I have a music technology degree but have forgotten so much as the years have passed. Your channel is top notch!

Underrated Channel. Great editing and explanation of concepts with the graphics. Keep it up!

My FIRST video with you... and you ALREADY SOLVE one of my biggest curiosities as I am a NOOB to Audio. Thank you. And, Happy Holidays!

This was helpful once again. Love the way you break everything down. Kudos 💯✌🏼

In Electrical Engineering school we learn all about this. Everything you said was spot on. Nice work!

Wow so much useful information! Especially the AES Test Tone part to put it into perspective. I did this test myself and I'm shocked that I can clearly hear the unwanted noise in my monitors at 96+kHz for both test tones. Considering I use a typically well regarded audio interface around 250€ this alone definitely convinced me to stay with 48kHz for my recording, mixing and mastering. Thank you for this! I'll dive deeper into this topic and I'm looking forward to more videos :) Best regards from Germany

I'm loving this channel! Just discovered it some hours ago.

Excellent presentation guys. Thank you.

Excellent thanks for this video!

Best explanation I've ever seen on this topic.

Just found your channel. You are both terrific. I appreciate the solid tech info as well as the pithy humor! I'm a long time audio guy and always learn something new from you. Thank you for the work you put into your very useful videos. I'm a fan! In Peace.. Bob

Excellent video - very clear with great info. Thanks!

Wow. 30 Years recording digital and now I understand it. Kudos to you!

I also record and mix at 48/24. The only reason I would record at a higher rate of 96khz is that my audio interface latency drops down to less than 3ms round trip, allowing me to use VST effects during recording with virtually no latency. Maybe that is a topic you can take on next?

Great content and excellent explanation. Another great video. Thanks.

2. video i watched, just discovered your channel this day. Subbed, Bell - undebatable great stuff and i love it. Interesting, scientific, entertaining. Criminally undersubbed!

This is easily THE greatest explanation on this subject. Ever - and with a great dose of hilarious British humor! Thank you so much guys, we're forever grateful for this. Bless you all.

Excelent video! I agree fully that ADDA is always the most comfortable on 48kHz... However, I would like to see your take on the processing sample rates. I've experimented a lot with this (oversampling in the plugins etc.), and from my perspective it does make a lot of sense to have those parts of your chain running in higher sample rates.

Nice to see this hammered home with some excellent illustrations and science to back it up. I just did my first project in 96k as an experiment and my system just about coped. Its funny how your mind convinces you it sounds better. But maybe I'm just getting better at production and mixing? 🤞

Thanks for this! such a great explanation. keep it up!

This is by far the best video of the subject I ever saw. Great job.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Despite having a degree in audio tech and have been recording my own music for the last 25 years, I became almost fixated with the idea of more is better. As a result, I always struggled to optimise my setup to match the continuously evolving marketing requirements and pressure from peers. I think you have just demonstrated in layman's terms the reason why going as high as 96K, 24bit is not only unnecessary but potentially, even harmful. I am now hoping that going back to 48K, 24bit will give my computer another couple of productive years whilst I'll also perhaps enjoy the process more now I won't need to keep optimising my setup for unreasonable specs.

Straight be coming one of my favourite Audio tutorial channels along with Produce like a Pro. This is hands down the best video in Sample and bit rate I’ve EVER seen. It’s crazy how much misinformation out this and this has really cleared it up for me and given me confidence before my first paid on location recording that’s coming up. Top works gents (and Grace of course :-)

Great stuff. Many thanks for this.

When doing the 48k vs 96k null test, it would be useful to have a spectrum analyser (Voxengo SPAN is my goto) to show where in the frequency domain the additional harmonics are occurring. Testing plugins for how well their oversampling algorithms work can be quite revealing - some are awful and the aliasing becomes readily apparent on loud high frequency content (particularly sustained tonal sources like Glockenspiel, Celeste and Triangle etc). Non-linear processing in the digital domain has definitely improved a lot with higher processor speeds allowing for higher oversampling rates.

I mostly use 48k at 24 bit. There are instances where I either need higher rates or higher bits. I use higher rates for audio restoration when digitizing and restoration work. It allows me to see all the problems clearly when I have to zoom right in. But it has no effect on sound. For bits higher than 24 on the other hand, I only use to record sound in the field (sound effects). I again, only use it rarely when recording extremely loud sounds (gun shots, cannons, explosives, jet engines, rockets, Formula 1). Higher rates and bits, I assume are also useful for scientists who use sound and acoustics in their studies (bioacoustics, stellar acoustics). But for musical purposes, 48k@24 is perfect.

Thank you very, very much for taking the time and trouble to explain this stuff so carefully and so well! Very much appreciated.

A really excellent video. Thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot, including from some of the comments too. Keep up the great work 👍

Fascinating stuff beautifully presented. I can 'perceive' a difference between 24/96 and 24/48, but have never been quite sure why until I watched your video! I'll definitely standardise on 24/48 now. I've always used it for video soundtrack work, but will now also use it for my CD output 🙂

I record audio for film and tv and have been asked to record sound effects such as explosions at higher sample rates as post production want the option for time stretching with no artefacts. But still record 99% of our work at 24/48

Nice one! Thank you for this!

Such a brilliant video. Thank you! Very nice to follow through the whole thing. liked and subscribed

Great video, lots of interesting info. I record vocals and other instruments at 32-bit so I don't have to set my levels at all and I never distort a take. I can sing very loud and very soft and never have to worry about my input level and where it is. The files are bigger but I have yet to have a project take up 1gb of audio data. That is with lots of vocal tracks and takes. And my 18TB drives are accommodating to these levels of data. Also, the 32-bit sounds better to my ears.😊

Ultra sonics are definitely generating some extreme Steely Dan sounds in this track :) Thanks for the well explained tech. stuff.

This is really by far a great explanation of how the sample rates works with examples and wave forms,and its exaclty what i was looking for, congratulations very good video

What an excellent video. Nice one!

There’s so much misinformation about this subject! Thank you for a great video. Also: just because a plugin offers oversampling options doesn’t mean higher is better. The quality of oversampling can vary and often sound worse than defaults. Always trust your ears, not the numbers :)

should render out the difference between the 192k and 44k versions and pitch shift it down. would be interesting to see what that sounds like.

Man, your channel is fantastic, thank you for doing what you do, you certainly deserve way more subscribers than you have! Please keep going :)

Great video. So well produced with so much accurate info. Thanks- you do the recording world a great service with videos like this. Question- what about recording DSD256 via appropriate mic’s like Sanken Chromatics of woodwind, vocals and strings? I’ve done null and related testing in our well isolated triple walled recording/live rooms here and have found some useful technical and creative advantages, which I assume you are well aware of. Obviously, we are talking about a much more expensive recording chain and construction standards than many studios can justify, but the differences are very interesting and quite different and very useful.

Great in depth video.. thankyou.. There's only a couple of areas you neglected to address, such being the use of higher sampling rates where audio recorded is intended to be repitched in music composition.. once such audio is pitched down by 2 octaves then surely theoretically the stuff we don't want which is floating outside the upper limits of human hearing can be brought down into the audible spectrum.. thus making higher sampling rates more effective at keeping the audible band clear if sound is destined to be mapped across a keyboard of several octave range. Also though.. as I understand it.. high sample rates are used in such pursuits as Oceanographic Audio Research... But for the same reason.. that there are sounds captured which are of interest to the scientific research, but which lay outside the human audible band.. whereby such sounds are again destined to be repitched in order to bring them into audibility.. By oversampling at 96 or 192kHz, one can again repitch downward by up to 2 octaves without bringing the sampling frequency itself down into the audible spectrum.

If you guys keep this up then you will be Kingz of teh internetz. Excellent channel Bong Friends.

This is amazing! Great video to show what sample rates really means. I had't no clue :D

Another fantastic video Mark, learnt lots. BTW great Tascam ;)

Finally, a definitive answer--that merits a sub. Thanks for the great video. I do have one use-case-specific question in mind: if I were to record a sound (let's suppose the mooing of a cow) with the intention of playback at 0.25 speed (think sound design, not music) would this be a case where recording at 192k would be the preferred method--given that the sound will still have 48,000 samples in each second after it's been stretched to quadruple length?

I am using 96KHz for editing purposes when I'm capturing audio or working on a project within a DAW. It's much easier to varispeed a 96K file at extreme percentages without it sounding off. As for capturing audio, it's much easier to edit out crackles and pops on a needledrop or cassette recording than it would be at 48KHz. When it comes to getting stuff out of the box, I always use 48K. Home at Last sounds fantastic regardless of the sample rate.

Thanks man for sharing the amazing information.

excellent content and style and production values

As a video guy, the comparisons between higher sample rate and frame rate was great!

You guys are incredible and I wish your channel every success. Thanks so much for the effort and quality of this video 🙏🏻

You guys are amazing appreciate your work 🙌🏽⚡️

Great stuff. I had already forgotten quantizing, AD/DA conversion and Nyquist and was in the state of "just knowing". This brought back that in simple and easily understandable terms. On top of human hearing only reaching about 20 Hz to 20 kHz, people who the most argue about that stuff are the ones whose hearing often doesn't reach higher than 12 or 14 kHz either, leaving them out of the paradise they're so keen to protect. Not only that, it often feels like many sounds at the top end are nasty unless it's just some echoey shimmery whoosh happening there making the sound and space feel bigger. And many producers love old analog gear like boards that have a sweet top and low end cut. Even better, the mixes often sound better when you cut some of that outer limit of hearing range and beyond rumble and shizzle, making it sound more powerful and focused without adding anything and seemingly not removing anything (a lot of what I said was of course said in the video as well and I seem silly stating it again). Also it was some producer on youtube that showed a plugin that adds tape saturation like distortion to the mastering, might as well use that to get a bit of that warm grit, since it's designed with that goal in mind. Guitarists also often like to criticize limited bandwiths of old digital gear, and at the same time love using such a tape machine that has a worn out tape and a preamp that heavily cuts high frequencies for smoother top end tone. Weird bunch. I just recently acquired a nice piece of 80's rack effect, a Yamaha SPX90, which had only range up to about 12 kHz and it didn't even have proper AD converter, but a combination of chips doing some kind of trick to digitize the analog signal. The result was a pretty nice sound just because the signal goes through the unit even without effects, even though it is digitized and loses some high frequencies. Just like Echoplex's preamp was used without the tape delay itself, just because it sounded nice. An example of how it is often the case that technical limitations provide happy accidents. Dither is another funny thing in video context. And gaming context. Playstation 1 had crazy amounts of dithering to make the games look great while saving in technology costs and processing power, allowing more complicated and fantastic games and graphics to exist. The mention of fps in movies and tv made me remember how some modern shows look weird and unnatural for the technological advancement of increased recorded framerate. I've been looking for a camera that can do video recording as well, and just now realized 60 fps might not even be what I wanted for filming myself. Thanks!

Really good explanation of the quality issues related to various bit depth and sampling rates ...24 48 is certainly my way forward. 👍🦄🙏🎩

*I feel like I'm watching the audio engineer equivalent of "Red Dwarf" (I love RD BTW!😏)* 😄👌

Great video and great channel. Subscribed.

Great video! I never used sample rate above 48 in any of my project only because every time I tested I could not hear the difference, even with colleagues swearing that they could (I always get a vibe of "The Emperor's New Clothes" when people talk about high sample rate). And also I always thought that the file sizes were not practical. Thanks for confirming that the little voices inside my brain were telling me the truth.

great! Can't believe you only have 14k followers, it's like a professionally produced television show!

Thanks for the video, and thank you for the invitation to disagree in the comments (as long as we include some supporting evidence). I totally agree that 16 bits at 44.1k is perfectly good for music reproduction. However, I have twice recently NEEDED to record at 88.2k. Both times it was because Fiverr session violinists had sent me recordings that were unusable due to their recording hardware not coping with the surprisingly high amount of ultrasonic energy from their violins. The first session player was using their computer's onboard audio input, and after I heard it I viewed its spectrogram to see what was causing the harsh sound. The aliasing was clearly visible because the violinist's vibrato made the harmonics wiggle quite a lot, and the aliased wiggles were all upside-down. I asked for a revision recorded at 88.2k and then I down-sampled the file to 44.1k on Pro Tools so I could import it into my session. This removed the ultrasonic frequencies digitally and left me with a surprisingly good recording. The second session musician claimed to be using a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (I have no way of knowing for sure) and their recording displayed the same upside-down vibrato when recording at 44.1k. So, the moral of the story is that if the audio interface has not got what it takes to filter out ultrasonic energy, then it is better to record at 88.1k or 96k so that the Nyquist frequency is raised above that energy. Afterwards, you can rely upon digital filtering to remove it while converting to a sensible sample-rate.

Very well explained. Intuitive to understand. Excellent! 👍🏻

Been looking for some explanation on this - video was absolutely spot on. Thanks.

This video is free?! My God the information! Thank you guys! Great content! New Sub!

One factor that would benefit from higher sampling rate is I/O latency, especially for those who rely on non-hardware monitoring while recording. A common example are guitar players recording through IR speaker simulators in the DAW. As long as CPU and HW resources in general allow it, 96Khz usually guarantees the 5ms or less latency most player need to get a realistic response during a recording session, without having to lower the buffer too much and incur in stuttering or artefacts. Apart from this potential reason for higher sampling rate (which is specific to recording rather than distribution), all the considerations in the video are agreeable, especially since you pointed out the internal oversampling often done by plugins dealing with high harmonic content, such as compression and saturation DSPs. Thanks for the vid, keep up the good work!

Thank you! Great explanation!

Thanks for the great videos. I know you guys are going to be huge, so keep up the amazing work!

Endgame level explanation. Well done!

Hello everyone at PresentDayProduction! I was looking for an answer to this question and this video was EXACTLY what I needed. I am not a pro, but I understand the science behind it. Gotta love science! Thank you for putting this tutorial together! I recently got a Zoom H5 and figured 96/24 would be best. Now I know better! I reset the device to 48/24 and also any work I do in Audition is now also 48/24.

I've just discovered your channel and already hooked 👋🏻

Nicely done gentleman! - I will incorporate this Video in my production class I teach for the University - much gratitude cheers

I love the video, it's been a dilemma for me for so many years. I've settled to work 48khz/24bit for almost 5 years now. However, there is an aspect you are disregarding and as a mixing engineer i have experienced it first hand. Plugins- Plugins run algorithms. Algorithms processing higher numbers (sets of data inputed) yield higher results (or at least different ones). So running a vocal file recorded at 48khz through a seventh heaven reverb plugin Itb sounds very different than running a 96khz one. Processed reverb might sound smoother or more "lush" simply because the data coming out of it is higher. In photo editing for example, photos are finally viewed on a screen with a maximum size of like 30x25cm, prob jpeg compressed at 1280x720p. But in order to get a perfect edited photo, the original content was MUCH much bigger so editors can zoom in and craft details like eye lashes or pixel editing. The higher the resolution, the more control they get over altering the content. In higher sample rate sessions, especially with plugins processing, the story seem to be similar. Try it with simple waves rbass plugin on a kick, you will have more control with the higher sample rate. With multiple tracks, now you see a difference. Once you finally mix all that down to a 44.1 it just sounds so sharp and tight, just like that big res photo you edited down to jpeg... Try it out and lemme knw - also love from Egypt y'all!!

It all comes down to one thing, what sample rate is the final master going to be? Any conversion in digital audio is less than ideal and you should record at the same rate you are going to playback.

Fantastic and informative video! As somebody who isn't involved in music production, I still found this incredibly interesting. Keep up the great work!

Very informative video 🙌🏼 thank you

Could be placebo, but I hear 96k responding better to elastic audio, pitch correction, and some plugins.

Hi. I’ve been wondering how you played back files of different sample rates from the same logic project. Am I missing something here?

Thank you so much for this information!

Only stumbled across this site today. Really great stuff guys!

AMEN!!! Thanks for this, this is what I've known and promoted for ages. 24/48 since 2004. Still holds true today.

Is a higher sample rate / bit depth beneficial for tempo stretching? The shorter length and higher dynamic range could theoretically maintain the smoothness of the audio as it’s stretched, but if the DAW oversamples prior to the stretch, the outcome should be the same-? I might be putting my ignorance on display here 🤪

This was a great explanation of both sample rate and bit depth, it was a great refresher and I picked up some added knowledge and understanding of the comparison in terms of recording and which is better. Up until now I've always thought 24bit/192khz was best, but this actually make a whole lot more sense. Thanks!

Great production and very informative

24/96 is great when you need to pitch/tune vocals or samples; Analog emulation plugins give a much better result espicially at higher freqs (anything that brings saturation), it's very clear with synths or cymbals or overdriven sounds

Would you make an exception in case of recording for a sound design where the plan is to time stretch the recorded sound in order to pitch it down by one or two octaves?

Awesome channel! Informative and always good for some chuckles :D The link to the test tones would be great.

Nice use of the video analogs to illustrate the bad assumptions! Kind regards, Daniel

Magically delicious fun facts found in this video!

You deserve way more views 👏 👏

I love the scientific explanation. You're the BOSS 👍👍👍 Subscribed!!!

Best Ever Explanations and so simple and easier to Understand Fully in short time, you guys have done the Wonderful job for any before always confused about the technology behind and Understanding the World of Sampling Rates in Audio World. Thank you kindly 🙂

As an audio engineer myself, I should point that most of what you said is true, nevertheless, there is some utility in high sample rate recording, specially in audio design and postproduction. Being so much above nyquist gives pitch headroom to manipulate (lower by several octaves depending the sample rate) audio without losing detail. In that regard ultrasonic information is usefull.

I really like your video, I remember when the ADAT went to 18 bit recordings and later higher, we did A / B tests and the higher bit rate sounded better, at least we imagened. Today 24 bit for the headroom and the processing of rooms etc. suite me fine. I think the 96 ... khz options are there for marketing reasons only. Thanks for your well produced knowledge video.

This is the most useful information on this topic. Crazy quality and amazing studio

THANK YOU!!! been saying this for years!!! it comes down to your DAW's specs and YOUR EARS!!! 24/ 48 is awesome for me . . .

In all explanations of audio sampling theory/the Nyquist Theorem that I've seen, a simple sine wave is always used. Would be nice to see it illustrated using a highly complex waveform for a change. I think it would put skeptics in a more accepting state of mind before going into all the other explanations and demonstrations.

I busted out laughing at least three times in this video. You Brits are hilarious. Love ya.

Very clear and precise explanation. You are great, guys! I'll stick to those 24/48 for my recordings, thanks.

Been teaching this for years, thanks for explaining it so well.