Samplerates: The Higher the Better, Right?

FabFilter · 570K views · 2020 · 29:22

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Information theory & signal processingAudio & video engineeringMusic theory, synthesis & productiontutorial

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as a clear explainer on Nyquist, aliasing and sample rate conversion artifacts.

What it is

Dan Worrall explains when higher sample rates help in recording and mixing, and when they do not. He goes into oversampling versus higher sample rates, and aliasing in distortion plugins.

Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2021 to 2023.

What Hacker News said

Strong rec gooseyard · 2023-04 · on “Nyquist Frequency”

Dan Worrall made a fantastic video which touches on Nyquist. His youtube channel is a tremendous resource: [this video]

Cites marcan_42 · 2021-05 · on “Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio”

This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all samples. So you will always be able to find corner cases where an encoder or format does worse and results in more audible artifacts; some of these might be encoder bugs, some might not. Therefore, it is fair to say that you might not want to rely on lossy compression for archival. But

Cites ilyt · 2023-01 · on “Why Cassettes?”

There is a bit more to that when we get to having to modify or convert audio formats, without "right" algorithms it might introduce some artifacts via aliasing [this video]