Audio from vinyl (24 / 96-192 khz). Converting/downsampling? Options

[Taishou]

Hi again

I have several digitized vinyls in FLAC, at 24 bit, 96-192 khz. Is it worth all that sample rate? I was thinking of making CD quality (16/44.1) FLACs or even mp3 320. I doubt I'll ever in my life spend more than, idk, 200 usd in headphones, so the over-quality looks a waste. What do you say? I'm far from an audiophile and I feel pretty happy with mp3 320 (I can't even tell from FLAC).

Anyway, I need to re-encode that at least for my mobile devices. Should I have any special care when converting? I use fre:ac (LAME 3.99.5). Should I just set 44.1 khz when encoding there and done? Or should I downsample with another tool and then encode? I just tried encoding something setting 44.1 in LAME and the result sounds the same as the original 24/192 (with my crappy headphones at least).

The same goes for FLAC or ogg (I tend to use the latter for my DAP). Just setting the sample rate when encoding is enough or is it better to do it with another program? (I doubt, but I wouldn't like regretting later because I made a crappy conversion).

Thanks!


(maybe this should go in the "vinyl" forum, but my concern is more with those high sample rates and downsampling, regardless the source)

[Taishou]

... Anyway, I just checked other FLACs I have that are supposedly 24 bit, but in Audacity show up as 32 floating point. Foobar says 24, as it should be. ...

The bit depth shown by Audacity is the default format that it converts input to and uses internally. If you want to keep it in 24 bit, for example you're just editing (cutting / pasting) and not doing any math (EQ, level changing etc), you can change the default using "Preferences --> Quality --> Default Sample Format".

Indeed. Everything, even mp3, it takes at 32 bits. Thanks for the tip/

If you're already using SoX, no reason to not use it for bit depth conversion too.

CODE

sox in.wav -b 16 out.wav rate 48k

should do the job quite nicely. It will use triangular pdf dither by default; since the LP noise floor is so much higher than that of 16-bit it may not really matter whether you dither or not, but it won't do any harm. Don't bother with noise-shaped dithers.

I was using the SoX plugin in foobar, but that's limited to re-sampling. I'll use the "stand-alone" SoX with that command.

After checking with Replay Gain in foobar all tracks of the LPs are above ~4.30db (that being the lowest value) and the peak or something (a number that appeared beside that, I don't have foobar here to check) was always around 0.99 and 0.95.


Btw, I wonder why so many ppl (almost everyone it seems) rips their vinyls at 24/96... Maybe keep the 24 bits for editing, but why such a high frequency is so wide-spread? From what I see and you told me it's more than clear it's practically useless.

This post has been edited by Taishou: Aug 28 2012, 05:55