Hello all, hope to get some feedback on this issue. I “upgraded” my Windows PC to 11 and now it seems I can no longer record from my Sony HX-PS500 “High Rez” turntable (USB) in 24 bit /88.2 sampling. With Wndows 10, it did work fine and made great recordings, nothing else was changed in the PC. I CAN record in 24/96 and while it does sound pretty good, I prefer the 88.2 setting. I tried it with 2 different (Windows 11) PC’s with the same result. While it does allow you to specify 88.2 in both Windows sound settings and the Audacity app, there is no sound recorded. Thanks in advance for any help in this matter.
James
Strange…
Somewhere under “Advanced Settings” for the USB device there should a check box that says. “Allow Applications To Take Exclusive Control Of This Device”. Try un-checking that. (I’m on a Win10 system right now and I’m not sure where to find it with Win11.)
If that’s selected, it MIGHT prevent re-sampling and only work at support sample rates the hardware actually runs at.
Or, from what I found online your turntable should have come with recording software. That might work, or maybe there is also a special driver for it.
I CAN record in 24/96 and while it does sound pretty good, I prefer the 88.2 setting.
FYI - “CD quality” is generally better than human hearing whereas we can clearly hear defects/limitations in analog vinyl (especially the noise). In a proper blind ABX test you can’t hear the difference in a high-resolution original and a copy down-sampled to 16/44.1.
Appreciate the prompt follow up. I do a lot of “wav” rips (16/44) on my Denon USB turntable, import into Audacity, then process the tracks as FLAC. I agree these sound very good as well but I (still) seem to prefer 24/88 processing as it seems to give more headroom to turn up the amp. My Sony’s “High Res Recording” software works OK, but again I prefer Audacity’s ability to create Metadata as I am exporting the files. When I first “upgraded” the PC to Windows 11 (not clean install as I wanted to keep my Apps and data), the turntable had to be re-enabled as Audacity did not list it as an recording device. My original concern is what is different about Windows 11 that causes this issue with NO other thing changed in the source, or th settings of Audacity. I will check on what you suggested later today. Thanks again.
James
Long post here … Nothing too important… 
24-bits potentially gives you more headroom than 16-bits.
The sample rate limits the signal/audio frequency. The Nyquist limit is half the sample rate so at 88.2kHz you can’t have a signal above 44.1kHz.
Headroom is the difference between the “digital maximum” of 0dBFS and the peaks in your file. i.e. If you have peaks of -3dB you have 3dB of headroom.
Pros generally record at -12 to -18dB leaving plenty of headroom. Then they adjust & boost the levels later during mixing & mastering, etc. But, nothing bad happens if you get close to 0dB, only if you “try” to go over.
We leave headroom during recording because the peaks are unpredictable, especially with an analog source.
Since pros are usually recording “live” the levels are less predictable and they don’t know how much headroom they’re going to need.
Headroom is a funny thing… If you don’t use it, you didn’t need it. If you use it, it’s no longer headroom!
As long as you avoid clipping, digital recording levels are not critical. IMO - We get too obsessed with meters & levels. (Although, “loudness” is important in you final production.)
It’s the same in the analog domain - If you have a 100W amplifier and your peaks are only hitting 50W you’ve got an extra 50W of headroom that you don’t need. (Although you usually don’t know how much power you’re using or how much you need.) Indecently, 3dB is a power factor of 2 so that 50W is also 3dB of headroom. If you try to get 110W out of that 100W amplifier you get analog clipping. My handy-dandy spreadsheet says that 50W out of a 1000W amplifier leaves 13dB of headroom…
There is a quick-trick for checking your peaks (and headroom) in Audacity - The Amplify effect will default to whatever change is needed for normalized/maximized 0dB peaks. i.e. If Amplify defaults to +3dB, your current peak is -3dB and you have 3dB of headroom. If Amplify defaults to 0dB (no change) immediately after recording your peaks are already 0dB and you probably have clipping (distortion). …You can cancel the effect before applying if you just want to check.
0dBFS is the highest you can “count to” with a given number of bits. When you play the audio, everything is scaled automatically to match you DAC, so although the numbers in a 24-bit file are bigger it’s not louder. 24-bit files have more dynamic range going down to -144dB and 16-bit files going down to -96dB which means the dynamic range is usually on the “quiet side” rather than on the loud side.
Regular (integer) WAV files, CDs, your ADC (recording) and your DAC (playback) are all hard-limited to 0dB.
It’s the ADC that clips during recording. With a USB turntable the ADC is built-into the turntable and there’s usually no way to adjust the analog level into the ADC, so you may not have control over headroom. (Good USB audio interfaces have a recoding level knob.)
With the default settings, Audacity converts everything to 32-bit floating point for “easier processing”. For all practical purposes, floating point has no upper (or lower) limit so you can do things like boost the bass and push the peaks over 0dB and everything will be OK as long as you lower the volume before exporting. The conversion to 32-bit floating-point and back is lossless.
…If you want to hear what low-resolution audio sounds like, export as an 8-bit WAV. You’ll hear quantization noise which is like a “fuzz” on top of the audio. It’s similar to regular analog noise in-that it’s most noticeable with a quiet signal. But unlike analog noise it goes-away completely with pure digital silence. If you do this 8-bit experiment, turn-off dither in Audacity’s settings. Dither is added noise that’s supposed to sound better than quantization noise.
Vinyl can go actually ultrasonic (above the hearing range) and higher than CD quality audio! 44.1kHz audio can’t quite go to the theoretical limit of 22,050Hz because filters aren’t perfect, but it’s usually darn-flat to above 20kHz. But, even though vinyl can go higher, most of the higher-frequency energy on a record is noise, and it’s too high to hear anyway. Digital is flatter over the audio range.
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