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you keep saying working in 24/96 is such a huge advantage. tell me what these are? as someone else just mentioned, mastered CDs are 16/44, how the hell can it then benefit you working at different bitrates etc.
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more headroom for a start. additionally, you can work in 24 bit/96 khz and dither down to 16 bit/44 khz for cd. a dithered 24 bit to 16 bit render will *always* sound better than a straight all in 16 bit render.
ill explain. dithering is the process of adding low level noise to a recording. if you know what it is, then you know where this is heading and i need to explain no more. if you dont, ill explain for the benefit of the uninitiated.
imagine a picture in photoshop of a puppy. saved from a digital camera, its a 32 bit bitmap which is capable of displaying 16.8 million colours.
now imagine you save this file as an 8 bit 16 colour bitmap. what happens is that there are not enough colours to accurately display the puppy and instead you get flat blocks of colour in the rough shape of a puppy. hardly any detail is perceived. no individuals hairs of fur. colour changes in visible gradiants because theres only 16 available colours etc.
theres a tool in photoshop called dither and in principle its the same in sound technology. dither adds speckled noise to an image when its rerendered.
if you were to take that 32 bit, 16.8 million colour bitmap and dither it down to 8 bit and 16 colours, you would still have a 16 colour palette but you will notice that the image has more detail than the undithered render. the speckled noise creates this stipled effect - colour gradients appear smoother because of the stipling. overall there is more detail in the original image retained. you can do this with any photo provided you have a photo manipulation program that can dither and see the results yourself.
transpose that idea to digital recording. 96,000 khz recordings have double the resolution and whilst the impact that has on sound fidelity is only barely noticeable to the human ear, its much the same thing as people scrapping over the sound of a real tb-303 and a fake. the difference in sound terms in minute, not even noticeable to 99% of the human race. yet once you notice it, you CANNOT GO BACK. same deal with classic analogue synth sounds and digital clones.
additionally, you will get less phasing problems caused by aliasing which if you work with digital synthesizers IS going to happen to various degrees and in many cases you will find you have more headroom than if you worked in 16 bit and 44 khz all the way through.
overall, working in 96 khz is a good idea and i would recommend it. the only downsides are that some soundcards have less audio ins/outs when working at higher sample rates and the cpu hit is much much higher. but these are things which you can work around by changing your workflow and bouncing more often. other than that i see absolutely no reason why you should not work in 24 bit/96 khz and dither down to 16 bit when you are finished. plenty of producers and engineers have been doing precisely this for years. whilst it would be a shame if the TI couldnt stream in 24/96, i guess its not that much of a problem. just render all parts from the virus in a separate project file and import into your 24/96 project. i appreciate this would negate much of the total integration feature of the synth but come on. its not the end of the world. theres enough in this latest iteration of the virus to warrant a new hardware revision. and if you aint happy, take it back and get a second hand virus c for less than half the price. then everyone is happy.