Do I really need a card with 192kHz sampling rate or 96?

What do you want to do with the recordings?

If you are going to simply rip to audio CD's for personal use, maybe pass out to friends, etc., then a 96 card will do you fine.

If you envision making MP3's (lossy compression) or using the resulting audio CD's to send to promotors or sell at gig's, then 96 won't be good enough.

There is a difference in the smaller connectors, but it's not one you're going to notice on a short cable run.

I would guess that 192 kHz sampling rate is completely overkill for home recording.
24 bit / 96 kHz sampling rate will be good enough.
Remember that a normal CD only has around 16 bit resolution / 48 kHz sampling rate.

The mini (RCA) connectors will not distort the sound quality in any way.
The 1/4" jacks are more robust and are more easy to connect and disconnect than the mini RCA jacks, thats why they are used in professional audio equipment. The mini RCA jacks are designed for HiFi equipment and more fixed installations.

What do you want to do with the recordings?

If you are going to simply rip to audio CD's for personal use, maybe pass out to friends, etc., then a 96 card will do you fine.

If you envision making MP3's (lossy compression) or using the resulting audio CD's to send to promotors or sell at gig's, then 96 won't be good enough.

There is a difference in the smaller connectors, but it's not one you're going to notice on a short cable run.
FOr starters I will be doing some personal recording with friends. There are possibilities this might turn into something larger and I might have to take the recordings out to present and share with others. I want to be able to record high quality CDs. I agree 192 is an overkill at this stage, I just do not want to purchase new equipment when I hit the higher level.

Right now my card of choice stays the Audiophine 192, I hope it last into the future.

Thanx so much

I doubt it'll matter much with the V-amp, that thing is running 33.1khz itself.

What do you want to do with the recordings?

If you are going to simply rip to audio CD's for personal use, maybe pass out to friends, etc., then a 96 card will do you fine.

If you envision making MP3's (lossy compression) or using the resulting audio CD's to send to promotors or sell at gig's, then 96 won't be good enough.

There is a difference in the smaller connectors, but it's not one you're going to notice on a short cable run.

I believe you are confusing the audio sampling rate with MP3 bit rate. He is asking about audio sample rate (which is 44.1 kS/s for CDs, and often the same for MP3s, and 48, 96 or 192 for prosumer or professional equipment).

I would expect to see no electrical performance difference between mini-phone connectors and 0.25 inch phone connectors, unless one is balanced (e.g. TRS) and the other is not (e.g. TS). I agree with early opinions that the difference is mechanical.

96 kHz sampling will produce very good results for home recording.

Recording at 88k and above requires a rediculous amount of power and drive/tape space. This often requires dedicated recording hardware like a dedicated hard drive recorder or digital tape recorder in conjuction with a dedicated A/D converter. Not cheap stuff. Without such dedicated software you would find that your computer would start to bog down after as few as 8-12 tracks. High resolution recording is extremely taxing even on prosumer hardware.

Another thing to factor in is dithering. Any time you record at high samplerates and want to burn to cd, you need to use dither in order not to "lose" audio quality. Dither adds a type of "noise" which allows the conversion to keep a percieved smoothness to your final product. In essence it is like a soft focus "lens" which smoothens out the gaps which are created when you downsample. Whenever you downsample there is a loss of digital data. So consider that because you want to convert to 16 bit 44.1k when you burn to cd, from 24bit (or 32bit float) 192khz, that is an extreme loss of data. Granted, with a good dithering software or hardware, you will maintain a good deal of the percieved audio quality but being that we are talking about home recordings, it is unlikely that we are willing to spend a lot of moneys on dithering software. In my point of view the less dithering, the better. In fact if you were to record your entire project at 16bit 44.1k there would be very few people who would truly notice so lon as you did a good job getting signal to disk.

24 bit 48k is a good comprimise. This is the level where there is the most percieved enhancement in quality. Anything above this is either a placebo, undetectable by a laymans ears or too difficult to reproduce using consumer/prosumer hardware.

Many people will say that it is bad to downsample from 48k to 44.1k. And theoretically it is true but for many years it was standard to master from 48k dat tapes to cd. Nobody is the wiser. Some people think the quality of cds today are better. Others say they are worse. Both are true depending on the recording, the producer and the engineer. All depending on the intended production quality and the audience.

For most pop projects, the client wants the end product to be as loud as possible. So the engineer will compress the heck out of the final mix. Then it will go to mastering and get compressed even more. The end result is a cd that is loud and has 0 dynamics. Then again there are classical cds out now which have a level of dynamics and an audio quality which could not have been achieved 10 years ago because of hardware/software limitations. Recordings which can reproduce a subtle pin drop as well as a thunderous timpany.

Digital recording is a conundrum. For years engineers and developers have worked to get the clarity and dynamic range that is achievable today. A quality which the music industry has always strived for. The difinitive hi fidelity. Now that we have achieved this. Other engineers, developers and software programmers have worked their buts of to reintroduce the noise, inherent limitations and colouration of analogue circuitry and tape saturation back into digital recording.

Humans are funny animals.

I doubt it'll matter much with the V-amp, that thing is running 33.1khz itself.

That would be pretty strange. 32 kS/s is more likely.

Disclaimer: I know jack-crap about it.

The Behringer manual claims that the 'DSP sample rate' is 31.250khz, so I'm wrong anyway. I have no idea what we're comparing here anyway, kS/s vs Khz, feel free to enlighten me if you've got the time. :D

Disclaimer: I know jack-crap about it.

The Behringer manual claims that the 'DSP sample rate' is 31.250khz, so I'm wrong anyway. I have no idea what we're comparing here anyway, kS/s vs Khz, feel free to enlighten me if you've got the time. :D

It's unusual, but as its inputs and outputs are analog, nobody will know the difference. If the I/O were digital, it probably wouldn't be 31.25k, as that's not a standard interface frequency. I suspect the pro-version uses standard AES/EBU sample rates.

S/s is samples-per-second, technically the correct term for sample rate.

Hz (not hz, BTW) is Hertz, which means cycle-per-second, used to describe frequency or clock source, which may drive a sampling device such as an analog-to-digital converter.

It has become common use to substitute Hz for S/s, because a sampling device (ADC) processing a signal at X S/s is driven (clocked) by a frequency source usually running at X Hz (or n*X Hz).

Please delete as all the info here was aimed at wrong card

seems I need to learn to read again ;)

sorry

jezzard