Why Higher Bit Depth and Sample Rates Matter in Music Production

What is the benefit of using higher bit depth and sample rate in a DAW session for recording music? Should you use 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit floating point? Is it worth recording music in 96kHz or 192kHz, or is 48kHz sample rate good enough?

Book a one to one call:

#AudioUniversity

Disclaimer: This description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click them, I will receive a small commission at no cost to you.

[Texasbluesalley]

Fantastic breakdown. I went through a 192Khz phase about 15 years ago and suffice it to say.... lack of hard drive space and the computing power of the day cured me of that pretty quickly. 🤣

[alanpassmore]

For me 24 bit, 48khz digital recorder with analog desk and outboard gives all I need. You get the balance of pushing the levels through the analog to create the excitement and keeping lower digital levels to capture it with plenty of headroom.

[oh]

I find a higher sample rate most useful when stretching audio tracks is necessary. Especially on drums to avoid “stretch marks.” But it's enough to bounce up from 48 (my standard) to e.g. 96 and bounce back when done.

[Sycraft]

Something to add about bit depth and floating point for audio processing is the phenomena of rounding/truncation and accumulated error. If you are processing with 16 or 24-bit integers then every time you do a math operation, you are truncating to that length. Now that doesn't sound bad on the surface, particularly for 24-bit, what would the data below 144dB matter? The problem is that the error in the result accumulates with repeated operations. So while just the least significant bit might be wrong at first, it can creep up and up as more and more math is done and could potentially become audible. It is a kind of quantization error.

The solution is to use floating point math, since it maintains a fixed precision over a large range. Thus errors are much slower to accumulate and the results more accurate. So it ends up being important not only for things like avoiding clipping, but also to avoid potentially audible quantization errors if lots of processing is happening. In theory with enough operations, you could still run in to quantization error with 32-bit floating point, since it only has 24 bits of precision, though I'm not aware of it being an issue in practice. However plenty of modern DAWs and plugins like to operate in 64-bit floating point which has such a ridiculous amount of precisions (from an audio standpoint) that you would never have any error wind up in the final product, even at 24-bit.

[Call-me-James]

A fun fact: The exact same reasoning is used in professional video cameras. The Arri Alexa 35 - a camera often used in movie making - has a whopping 17 stops of dynamic range. So even if a scene is way under exposed or over exposed, the problems can be corrected in post-processing.

[mastersingleton]

Thank you for showing that 24 bit is not necessary for audio playback however for audio production that makes a big difference in terms of the amount of buffer between clipping and not clipping the input audio that is being produced.

[simonmedia]

I always thought about the sample rate problem being that if you wanted to slow down a piece of audio with the highest frequencies being 20kHz, you'd lose information proportional to the amount you slow it down. So you need the extra magical inaudible information beyond 20kHz for the slowed down audio to still fill the upper end of the audible spectrum. That is something every producer will have probably experienced.

[lohikarhu]

Yep, I think that it's quite analogous to photography, where 8-bit colour channels work "pretty well" for printed output, but really fall apart for original scene capture, and just get worse when any kind DSP is applied to the "signal", where 'banding' shows up in stretched tones, and softened edges can get banding or artifacts introduced during processing... Great discussion.

[RealHomeRecording]

I like high sample rates and I cannot lie. You other engineers cannot deny....

[pirojfmifhghek]

That video you mentioned last time absolutely blew my mind. I didn't have a clue that the aliasing around the Nyquist frequency issue was a thing at all. I had the feeling that higher sample rates were better for basic audio clarity, in the same way that a higher bit-depth helps with dynamic range. I just had no idea how or why.

[colin.chaffers]

Love it, I worked for Sony Broadcast including professional audio products, my team worked in Abbey road and the like, this take me back to those days when the analogue and digital battle lines were being drawn, I've always maintained digital offers a better sustainable quality, for the reasons you outline. Keep it up

[BertFlanders]

Thanks for clarifying these things! Really useful for deciding on project bitrates and sample rates. Cheers!

[shorerocks]

Thumbs up for the Dan Worrall link. His, and Audio Universities videos are the top vids on YT to watch.

[macronencer]

This is an excellent and very clear explanation. Thank you so much! I've seen Dan Worrall's videos on this topic, and I agree they are also brilliant.

[DDRMR]

I've slowly been learning the benefits of oversampling for the last few years and before final mix export ill spend an hour or so applying oversampling on every plug in that offers the option on every mixer track.

This video really solidified my knowledge and affirmed that me spending that extra time has always been worth it!

The final mixes and masters do sound fucking cleaner by the end of it all because I do use a lot of compressions and saturation on most things.

[maxheadrom]

Both this and the previous video are great! Thanks for the great work!

[rowanshole]

It's like Ansel Adams 'zone system' for audio.

Adams would prefog his film with light, then over expose the film in camera, while under exposing the film in chemistry, so as to get rid of the noise floor (full blacks) and get rid of the digital clipping (full whites), both of which he maintained "contained no information".

This resulted in very pleasing photographs.

[benjoe]

Would be cool to see the importance of audio resolution in resampling!

[mandolinic]

This stuff is pure gold. Thank you so much.

[theonly]

More samples are a great thing for denoising as well.
Temporal Denoising is quite a resource intensive task, but it works wonders in recodings of any type. Especially if you want to get rid of higher frequency noise.