this is just cos you can't hear difference between an aliasing artifact and digital noise... but digital noise produced by bit and by aliasing are different... maybe you should record some classical music then you'll hear that not only the bit rate is important but the frequency too. As saied before maybe this depends on the music stile you're recording.
Regards, Lorenzo

is there much more strain on the cpu when going from 44khz to 88 or 96khz?

Haven't tried it personally, but I believe so, yes. 88.2KHz would double CPU usage on plugins and stuff?

It's generally advised that increasing the bitrate (from 16 to 24bits) rather than the frequency samplerate will be more beneficial to achieving better sound quality whilst trying to make best use of CPU usage.

If you're doing pop- or dance-music or similar, then no-one's going to hear or admire the nuances of higher sample rates anyway!

My ears are fucked, so I can't tell either way, hoho, but I've heard this being said more than once: Some people CAN notice a difference between 48KHz and 96KHz, etc, but they can't often say which one they prefer.

Something else I thought of, when it comes to aliasing, Korg's workstations ALL interally use native 48KHz for all the samples and mixing, but no-one's ever said "hold on, this keyboard sounds shit when recording for CD (44.1KHz)".

And Korgs sound mighty fine too with their 48KHz! Mind you I'm not entirely sure that every rom sample is 48KHz on the mid rangers like Triton or M3. But I do know that my 44.1KHz sampled drums collection sound better on the Korg than some other 44.1KHz workstations. Definitely more top end 'air', whatever that means :) But after recording it at 44.1KHz, can I still claim it sounds better? Dunno, its different. And in the end its all synthetic, there is no 'right'.

Cheers,
B

They are nice and bright, "airy". Certainly I can't recall ever hearing any aliasing, but then again my ears are shot!

In the case of the Korg Trinity with PBS-TRI expansion (custom 8MB flash-ROM sampler) if you uploaded a 44.1KHz sample, the Trinity automatically converts it to 48KHz before storing it on the 8MB chip, as it can't deal with any other sample rate. Reason I know this, is that uploading samples to the Trinity and then downloading them back off of it the file sizes have increased as they have been converted to 48KHz. Or the 8MB chip couldn't load 8MB of 44.1KHz samples, as it would require more than 8MB to store them as 48KHz. So any samples I upload to the Trinity I record them natively at 48KHz before uploading them, to avoid at least one lossy conversion.

That's the big question: if you load a 44.1KHz sample into ram and play it, at what point does it get converted to 48KHz? While the samples are being scanned? Before sculpting by the filter and amp? Before FX?

And the whole problem of converting the sample rate, how is that possible without audible artifacts? Obviously it can be very good, but surely changing sampling rates several times in the signal chain must have an impact.

Cheers,
B

Higher sampling rates are used for DVD / TV media, stick to 44100 at 24 bit