Tips & Techniques:Bit Rate and Frequency Recording Guideline

If you don't have a $3,000.00 rack mount dithering machine, record at 24Bit /88.2. When you do your final mix, intended to be burned onto a CD at 16/44.1, you won't get that grainy, unclear imagry. It sounds awsome to record at 96khz, but when you burn your CD, you loose all that brilliance. This tip was given to me by a producer who has 1.5 million sales to his credit.

I personally spent eight hours burnning sample CDs to proove to myself that this was indeed true. The music I worked with, at the time, was ambient guitar. One song in particular had a distorted guitar (Carlos Santana style) playing a ballad. The shocking difference between 88.2 and those other higher freqencies (after final dither down to 44.1) was the precieved distance between listener and guitar. 88.2 kept the distance and shimmery clarity. All higher than 88.2khz rates (after dithering down to 44.1) destroyed that shimmery clarity. It was esspecially noticable in the reverb.

[heybub419]

I agree...I notice that, on my system, 96k sounds weird when recording, like distant...88.2k sounds fuller, more "up close", for lack of a better word