Originally Posted by
light-o-matic
1. Sampling rates (eg 44.1K, 48K, 96K) only apply to digital systems. Bit depth (16 bit, 24 bit) also only apply to digital systems. The sampling rate tells you how many samples per second the system is processing.. which must be at least two times the highest audio frequency passing through the system. The bit depth is the number of binary digits used to store each sample.. Larger number means more resolution.
2. Yes, sort of, but it's not that simple. In theory greater bit depth equals greater S/N ratio (signal to noise).. more dynamic range, and greater sample rate means better frequency response. But mathematically speaking, 96K sampling is actually unnecessary and shouldn't make any difference. Yet sometimes it does. Why this is true and actually whether it is true is the subject of a lot of debate.
Analog systems do not have a sampling rate or bit depth because those describe the functioning of digital audio circuits, which analog gear does not have. Analog gear is just rated with analog specs eg frequency response (in Hz/Khz), S/N Ratio, THD (total harmonic distortion).. etc. Digital gear has these numbers too, they are the actual measure of the audio performance of the gear.. whereas sample rate etc just tells you the internal processing that determines the theoretical maximum performance. So, a piece of equipment with 24 bit samples may have a theoretical S/N of 144 dB (if I remember correctly) but in practice the measured system S/N number will be much less.
3. No, those parameters ONLY apply to digital circuits.
The reason digital mixers exist is because digital circuits have gotten so cheap that it is actually cheaper to implement ALL the circuits of the mixer as emulations in computer code rather than as individual circuits, rather than having separate circuits for each feature of each channel, it is possible to implement features like complex fader curves, complex eq curves, multiple effects, multiple filters etc.. without adding any extra circuitry (just as long as you have enough memory and processing power) and you get a more consistent result. Whether you can get better sound quality from a digital mixer than analog is debatable.. it very much depends on the design of the gear and how you use it. I think it is fair to say that a very simple but high quality analog mixer will usually sound better than a cheap-ass digital, if the sources are high quality analog sources, but if the inputs are all from digital sources then maybe not?? And it is also safe to say that a very highly featured digital system with many stages of processing can easily outperform an all-analog version of the same system.
4. The bit rate and sample rate (not to be confused with frequency response, which is a related but different thing) only matters if your source material uses it. So if you have a sound card capable of 96K max sample rate but you are only playing music at 48K rate, the fact that your card can do 96K if you ask it to means nothing. It's like a car that can hold four people but you only have two people in it so it doesn't matter. Also, other factors affect the sound quality so if you have two sound interfaces (aka cards) converting a 24bit/48K (because that's what a "sound card" is.. it's a digital to analog converter, and sometimes also analog to digital).. one might sound better than the other, because it's a better design.
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