I’m thinking about fooling around with some high sample rate projects (192kHz and/or 384kHz) and I was wondering if there’s any easy way to get a list from Nuendo which plugins are happy at those sample rates and which are not. I would presume the included ones are, but I’m sure not all of my 3rd party ones are.
I know, that’s not what you were asking for, but these two white-papers by Dan Lavry are always a great read in that context:
→ http://www.lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-white-paper-the_optimal_sample_rate_for_quality_audio.pdf
→ http://lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-sampling-theory.pdf
[…]
Conclusion:There is an inescapable tradeoff between faster sampling on one hand and a loss of accuracy, increased data size and much additional processing requirement on the other hand.
AD converter designers can not generate 20 bits at MHz speeds, yet they often utilize a circuit yielding a few bits at MHz speeds as a step towards making many bits at lower speeds.
The compromise between speed and accuracy is a permanent engineering and scientific reality.
Sampling audio signals at 192KHz is about 3 times faster than the optimal rate. It compromises the accuracy which ends up as audio distortions.
While there is no up side to operation at excessive speeds, there are further disadvantages:
1. The increased speed causes larger amount of data (impacting data storage and data transmission speed requirements).
2. Operating at 192KHz causes a very significant increase in the required processing power, resulting in very costly gear and/or further compromise in audio quality.
The optimal sample rate should be largely based on the required signal bandwidth. Audio industry salesman have been promoting faster than optimal rates. The promotion of such ideas is based on the fallacy that faster rates yield more accuracy and/or more detail. Whether motivated by profit or ignorance, the promoters, leading the industry in the wrong direction, are stating the opposite of what is true.
(Dan Lavry)
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Anything above 24 bits / 48kHz is really for audiophiles who pretend their ears work better than everyone elses.
While that is true in so far as reproduction goes, it is not necessarily true in the case of synthesis. If what you are doing isn’t inherently band limited, you can get aliasing. Now you would hope that the device/plugin doing the synthesis would oversample its output and then filter it, but not everything does, or does a good job of it. One solution for that is to just oversample the project. If you run the whole project at 4xFS it doesn’t matter if a sampler or amp sim isn’t properly suppressing ultrasonics, you aren’t likely to get any aliasing in the audible band.
The resource usage is not really a concern, my system is plenty powerful enough to run what I want with headroom to spare. Remember that document was written in 2012 in the intervening decade CPUs have gotten a good bit faster. The 12th gen CPUs are about 2x the power core-for-core and have double the core count (not counting E cores).
Either way this isn’t something I’m super concerned about, just something I’m interested in playing with and wondering an easy way to get a list of what plugins support what rates rather than simply trying and seeing if things fail.