44.1 or 48kHz?

[-mjk-]

You are better off using a high quality conversion service or software. When your music is Mastered, be sure to tell the Mastering service what you are going to do with your music so you can have them deliver it to you in the appropriate format and level.

SoundCloud has a Mastering service. I have a Pro account and I won't use that Mastering service they have even though it's included. Who knows what they're doing?

 

[Logrinn]

As for Bandcamp - what I understand you can upload 24bit/48kHz songs and fans will be able to buy and download that - up to a certain length. If the recording is longer you’re ”stuck” with 16bit/44.1 kHz.

That is - the same quality as used on CD’s.

Speaking of these numbers and what they mean in ”reality” - I’m pretty sure that none of us above the age of two (or perhaps five) can hear anything above 10kHz.
Or put another way - if you’re concerned about the quality of the recording being 44.1 kHz or 48kHz - just remember that if you sit in front of a pair of speakers listening to your recording and somebody sneaks up behind you, the change in airpressure in the room will affect the sound you hear. If you lift one of your arms a couple of inches from the mixing desk, your body will make microscopic adjustments to compensate forcing your head to move a fraction of an inch to the side. That movement will be many times the wavelength of these high upper frequencies resulting in that you now are listening to some frequencies out of phase.
Even a fly in the room flapping it’s wings will change the sound coming from the speakers.

So put in another way - don’t think too much about the quality of the components in your recording chain. There’s a very high probability your ears can’t hear the difference anyway.

 

[-mjk-]

I tell you what I can hear at age 65: I can hear transient intermodulation distortion, and also digital aliasing. I can also hear midrange smear caused by bad slew rate ICs and also electrolytic caps in the audio path.

 

[JSchmo_Bass]

Exactly my thoughts MJK.

My original query wasn’t so much about extracting peak performance from the choice of sample rate itself. All seem to agree 44.1 vs 48 is imperceptible for almost all humans even in like-for-like A/B comparisons if all else is constant. Hearing is believing and I hear no difference on the DP24 with that (admittedly lame tests in basement with a mic and acoustic guitar). However I can hear a slight difference recording in 24 vs 16 bit; 24 sounds a touch better to me in this case, especially for quiet parts when you later boost volume.

Rather I had been wondering about the SR choice’s impact on accumulation of digital artifacts and noise at each step of our work due to conversion, including the DSD to PCM conversions that may done in the ADC and DAC chips.

My take away from all this is that the design of the DP24SD seems to be clever enough such that there is not a “conversion penalty” for working at one of either 44.1 vs 48kHz rate in these machines.

So we can choose, perhaps based on downstream likely end use, and move on...

 

[Arjan P]

Speaking of these numbers and what they mean in ”reality” - I’m pretty sure that none of us above the age of two (or perhaps five) can hear anything above 10kHz.

That's quite an exaggeration. Yes, the upper 'limit' decreases as we get older (starting at an age of around 8) but scientifically the assertion is that the sound level needed to hear frequencies above 15 kHz sharply increases as we get older. So there is not really a limit, other than the sound pressure needed to make someone hear a certain high frequency. Personally I remember hearing 17 kHz noise from a tube light when I did a hearing test at 23 years old. Possibly I would still hear it today, but at a much higher sound level.

 

[-mjk-]

Yes @Arjan P I can hear 15 kHz (and a bit higher) in my studio headphones but I have to crank it up. It would sound like an air raid siren to a rat, but who cares? Another factor of course, is the linearity of whatever we are using to listen to. I remember being in somewhat of a panic when my Bluetooth ear buds seemed to reveal some issues with my hearing, It ended up being the other way around - my trained ears revealed issues with the earbuds' playback curve (they were not matched to each other at all). For what we cannot hear, we have meters.