Richard Rauch wrote:
> Thanks (and thanks to other contributors) for interesting insights.
> 
> I guess I'll record at 44.1KHz then for convenience at burning CDs,
> unless I find myself in possession of a much better audio source
> than the tape players I have.

Hi,

I usually capture at the highest resolution possible and then convert
down after post processing. while I agree that 44.1/16 sounds the same
as 48/24 I believe that any significant amount of processing will reduce
the effective resolution of the signal.

The reason pro systems use 48KHz is they have a wider stop band, thus
lower pass band ripple. This enables cheaper or higher quality filters
to be designed. The same is true in digital. You can trade quality for
complexity, or increase the bandwidth and gain on both. There is
obviously a sensible limit when subjective measures come into play.

My theory goes that any processing should introduce the minimum of
additional error in the signal at its final resolution. If all the
quantisation noise, rounding errors and pass band ripple etc occur below
the threshold of 16 bits when processing at 24 they will not affect
a 16 bit signal at the end of the day.

I capture data at 48/24 and then use gwc and secret rabbit code
(resample) before archiving. gwc is a great audio denoiser and has
proven much more stable than most alternatives I've tried even for
simple edits. Tested on audio files > 1GB, RAM+swap < 1GB.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gwc/
http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/quality.html

Julius O Smith covers the subject of filters and resampling very well.
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/resample/

Simon