@Beat Kaufmann said:
Hello Vagn Luv
I suggest that you should write RME and all other companies of high-tech audio interfaces:
Please don't integrate the 192kHz Samplerate-Possibility any more. It impacts the audio fidelity.
...?
I have better things to do with my life than policing manufacturers of converters and informing them of the absurdity of their "higher samplerates=better sound" marketing claims, but I will spend a little time trying to disspell fiction from facts here on VSL's great forum. [;)]
Really, Beat, I'm not trying to bust your balls or anything. It's fantastic that you spend so much time on making tutorials available to others, but I think you will agree with me that making open, technical reccomendations brings with it added responsibility in being factually correct. I'm only trying to help you in this endavour.
Imo there needs to be a distinction between the recording scenario and the sample playback scenario:
THE RECORDING SCENARIO
You will be recording real world instruments or voices. The recordings will go through the AD process and end up at the samplerate the session is created at. Here it makes sense to record in either 48, 88.2 or 96KHz for best precision in the audible range of the converted signal, but any higher (like 176.4 or 192 kHz) is likely to have a negative effect on the precision and fidelity of the low frequency range, or at best there will be no audible difference. No matter what medium the final master is going to there can be advantages to record at a samplerate that optimally suits the mix (classical, hiphop, rock etc) and the way the converter works, even though it may not perfectly divide in 2.
In the end it all comes down to converters working differently, with some yielding better results 48k and others at another frequency, but in the words of legendary converter designer Dan Lawry there is absolutely no sense in moving above 96KHz. He theorizes about the optimum samplerate being around 56Khz, with enough precision in the mid and upper range of the frequency spectrum to provide for extreme clarity and quality, while not compromising the low frequency response.
THE SAMPLE PLAYBACK SCENARIO
You will only be playing back samples, either by having virtual instruments in your session or streaming them from a slave (network stream, digital audio transfer or DA-to-AD analog transfer). In the case of VSL samples, that are all delivered in 44.1KHz, there is nothing to be gained fidelity-wise by running the session in a samplerate higher than the frequency of the original samples. It will only introduce a higher CPU load due to the realtime conversion that has to take place, but one upside that has to be mentioned is that it will lead to less session latency (the hardware buffer is reduced the higher the samplerate is). Quality of audio is not improved, though. Even post-processing like time compression and expansion will not sound better if you bump up the session samplerate higher than the rate of the source samples. It's a matter logic, really.
Last, don't buy into the "higher is better" marketing hype that most converter companies try to sell us. They project the logic that a higher samplerate will get more of your real world sound into the computer (which in theory is true), but ignores that the conversion process will completely negate this and likely provide an inferior result to a lower rate, on top of heavilly burdening your system with high storage requirements, heavy CPU loads and lower voice counts.