Comment by speak_on
3 days ago
Just to wrap this up. Is your professional opinion that techniques like antialiasing/oversampling/etc and any sample rate above 44.1 kHz are essentially an industry-wide scam and the perceived benefits are not true?
And since there are no double-blind studies supporting this tech, both using and adding any of these features to your software would only be propagating this scam further? I.e. far more than just lecturing "about stuff that isn't true" this actually physically implements features that are not true?.. OK, at least you are staying consistent.
(Also, looking forward to you discovering that there are not many double-blind studies supporting the "delusion" that the effect of a low pass filter is real and not just something we can measure but can't hear.)
No need to add any features to Ardour - it already supports any sample rate that your hardware supports.
There are places where (a) double precision (or better) floating point math benefits DSP, but that's nowhere in Ardour (and likely, if one is clear about the definition, in any other DAW either) - certain types of plugins can benefit from this, but they should not impose that cost on the rest of the processing infrastructure (i.e. they should convert internally and then back again, rather than require that the whole host uses 64 or 80 bit floating point.
There is a reasonably good argument for 96kHz because of the possible characteristics of the brickwall filter and its impact on aliasing. This argument gets a lot weaker for even high SRs.
However, both of these are largely theoretical in the sense that very few people, if any, can reliably hear the results in actual produced music or soundtracks. So while it might be a good idea to use higher SRs, whether that actually results in something that can truly be said to "sound better" is much more questionable.
At the highest level, I think that all of this is pretty irrelevant. Most of the music that people consider "great" was recorded with equipment far below the quality levels achievable with mid-priced pro-sumer gear today (mics perhaps being the sole exception). Great music/great sound is, I think, appreciated largely independently of its audio "fidelity". There is a huge difference between an amazingly well-recorded ensemble and a poorly recorded one, but for most people, if the well-recorded ensemble is playing stuff they don't like and the poorly recorded one is playing some stuff they love, all the "fidelity" in the world won't improve the former and the lack of it won't stop them loving the latter.
In addition, with the rise of deeply impressive sample libraries and better and better synthesizers running as plugins, the AD/DA elements of music during "recording"/composition are becoming less and less important for more and more music. That amazing patch someone uses in Onmisphere doesn't get better or worse by using a higher SR, and that incredible string library (e.g. New Albion) is what it is regardless of what your converters can do.
So, in short, I would say: do what you want, but if you're going to try to justify it with science, make sure the science is right and if you're going to try to justify it with "sound", then be aware that for most people the differences won't matter (or even exist at all).