JOM,

I generally use 48kHz by choice and 44.1kHz when there's no choice. Personally I rarely bother with 96kHz because most people's ears can't tell the difference anyway, and certainly not my ears. 24bit sampling is perfectly adequate. 16bit is perhaps a bit restrictive for initial sampling as one doesn't want to accidentally run out of headroom. Once in the DAW, most samples are converted to floating point, so headroom is no longer an issue. For rendering, 16bit is fine unless one's very concerned about the highest quality, though few if any people can really hear the difference.

Where high sample rates do help is for "oversampling" right at the very start of the sampling chain, i.e., right where the pre-amp gets converted to digital, as a higher sample-rate allows better protection against aliases (e.g., not accidentally converting some noise at, say, 48kHz plus 47kHz into something audible) and by avoiding very sharp cut-off low-pass filters around the 20kHz area. One you have the samples, though, there's very little benefit in maintaining sampling above the 44.1/48 area.

One of the benefits of using floating-point data within the DAW, is that the degradations that used to be due to bad gain-staging pretty much just go away. No increase in noise if your signals are low, no risk of clipping if they're high. The maths just does it. Of course one can get the rendering levels wrong as one goes back to the 44.1kHz/16bit or whatever.


I did some comparisons years ago between various sample rates for mp3, ogg-vorbis and similar of flac, starting from some high quality CDs that I used for auditioning Hi-Fi kit.

As you would expect, higher compressions of mp3 and ogg-vorbis were not so good. High sample rates with low compression actually were pretty darned good ... most people wouldn't tell them from the originals.

The .flac files I'd made from the original CD .wav files I converted back to .wav and did a binary comparison with the original from which they were made. They were binary identical. Flac is totally lossless ... it does not degrade the signal at all.

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts
BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.