It depends on the equipment. With very high quality equipment (vinyl + turntable + tone arm + cartridge + stylus + pre-amp + sound card) and suitable care in setting it all up, recording at 96/24 will give the best copy that technology can provide. With below par equipment anywhere in the chain the benefits diminish extremely rapidly.kozikowski wrote:What are the opinions about capturing at a Very High data rate and downsampling to a Music CD if needed.
The computer is probably the least critical of the recording system components - it needs to be "good enough". As long as it can accurately save the data from the sound card, then all you need. You can probably pick up a suitable base unit from a car-boot/garage sale for $10 or less, but there's no harm in using something better.
Many budget sound cards produce worse quality recordings at high sample rates than at 44.1 or 48.
Modern, high quality D/A, A/D converts can accurately convert frequencies up to about 45% of the sample rate, which gives you an audio bandwidth greater than 19 kHz with a sample rate of 44100 Hz and at 48 kHz sample rate takes it above the full 20-20k audio range.
There are however some practical implementation issues involved in high frequency conversion, such as "pre-ringing", that justify using sampling rates that are substantially above 40 kHz, provided that the equipment is of sufficiently high quality that the benefits are not outweighed by reduced conversion accuracy and increased noise. There are no theoretical or practical engineering benefits to using sample rates above 96 kHz for recording or playing audio. There is a very good paper on this issue, and I keep losing the link, so I'll post it here: http://lavryengineering.com/forum_image ... Theory.pdf
If you have one of these in your recording set-up and the rest of your set-up matches in terms of quality, then definitely go for 96 kHz sampling rate recording and convert down to 44.1 to burn to CD.
but if you've got one of these, then you're probably better sticking to 44.1 kHz
