It is less likely to result in aliasing issues when recording very harsh, high-end sounds like drum cymbals, brass, and white noise. Many argue that a sample rate of 96kHz offers a more complete bandwidth. Equally, many streaming services are now allowing 48kHz as a sample rate, including iTunes. Perfectly adequate for music, right? Whilst this is true, the argument for higher sampling rates has become more prevalent in recent years due to advances in technology. Based on Nyquist theory, this allows us to reproduce frequencies up to 22,050Hz. Red Book Standard, Nyquist Converters, and Folding Frequenciesįor a long time, the industry standard for red book format (commercial CD release) has been a sample rate of 44.1kHz. This allows for a greater level of accuracy when converting from analogue to digital. Taking this concept further, by using an even higher sampling rate, we can record more points in each cycle. By having twice as many sampling points per cycle we need to reproduce, we can create a far more accurate representation when converting from analogue to digital. For every positive section of a wave, we have the corresponding negative section. The reason for us needing double the sample rate of the highest frequency we want to hear is rooted in the concept of the audio wave. As an example, a sample rate of 10kHz (10,000Hz) would be able to reproduce audible frequencies up to 5kHz with anti-aliasing. This is also known as Nyquist’s Sampling Theorem. We measure this in Hz (or kHz) and it is used to determine the frequency range that you are able to record audio. Sample rate, as you may have guessed, is the number of samples per second in a piece of digital audio.