Unless PG Music is going to re-record all of the samples at 96kHz 24 bit, they would have to upsample the existing audiophile files. Well, any of us who need the existing files at 96k can do that ourselves.
Yep, but a better idea than that is to simply export at 96kHz. It doesn't matter whether the Realtracks audio files are upsampled before the tracks are rendered or after, so there's no need to store all of the data at 96kHz if BIAB can simply render the file and upsample on the fly.
Although I’m sure that, if PG Music goes to the expense of re-recording Audiophile at 96k, those few clamoring for this won’t mind paying the extra few hundred bucks for delivery, will they?
If we were to re-record ALL of the existing (past and present) RealTracks, that would involve
thousands of hours of re-recording, possibly
tens of thousands of hours, and likely hundreds of thousands of dollars being paid to the musicians to re-create the previous Realtracks. The "few" that are clamouring for 96k RT's would likely have to pay MUCH more than an extra few hundred bucks.
This makes me suspect that original, premix, files may have been erased for space
That's quite possible. I don't personally know whether the original files still exist somewhere, but keep in mind that we've been doing RealTracks since 2008 when a "large" hard drive was maybe 500gb. Back around that time I worked as a sysadmin for a publishing company with about 120 employees, and the
entire company's storage across
multiple serverswas around 16tb. PG being a smaller company likely would've had less than that, so I'd imagine after some time that the original files may have been deleted. This is entirely speculation, however.
Way too much gets made of this. No one can hear the difference.
In general, yes. Even young people with perfect ears would be hard pressed to hear the difference.
These days I sometimes don't hear kitchen timer beeps over the tinitus. Ho Hum.
Same here. I'd blame my days as a drummer (despite wearing ear protection), but sadly for me it's hereditary.
IIRC someone at PGM said their recordings were made at 48kHz/24bit, but don't quote me ... that may be a false memory.
I don't know the answer. It's possible that some of the recordings were made at 44.1/16, since in many cases the recordings were done halfway across the world from us, and going back to 2008 when we started we may have opted for 44.1/16 simply to be able to transfer the files faster over a slow internet connection. Again, purely speculation.
Sampling at 96kHz has benefits because the anti-aliassing filters can be gentler and have fewer phase artifacts. Once recorded, though, there's really negligible (possibly nil) benefit in a higher sample rate until one gets to the final digital-to-analogue stage, when up-sampling to allow a gentler filter can again be a benefit.
Correct, however oversampling provides that same benefit even when recording at 44.1kHz.