Posted by Kaapeine 4 hours ago
Most modern digital synths have already caught onto this and run internally at much higher sampling rates even if their output gets downsampled, but sometimes you run across a vintage plugin that runs at the host audio rate and working in a higher sampling rate is audible.
Oversampling gives you headroom for aliases for the rest of the synth that is more vulnerable to it.
* Some people are still making this mistake, despite information on the (many) ways to do it the right way being widely and freely available!
There's some ways to do band-limited distortion but...they aren't nearly as widespread, easy, or universal as band-limited oscillators.
Ring modulation is funny though because you'd ideally want the sidebands to modulate down by default rather than filter them out, that's why you're using it.
192 for mixing and mastering can be useful especially if you're doing a lot of effects, especially anything that pitch shifts. But I've seen low quality phone-microphone recordings make it to the master; if you capture lightning in a bottle, it hardly matters what the settings were, what the microphone was, or anything else.
To try to imagine something similar: the human eye is unable to see UV light, yet fluorescent paint has a visible quality of its own compared to "normal" pigments.
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34698427
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138561
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633
2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639
It's a bit redundant for a skilled technician, they're already used to setting the gain staging, inbound compression, and feathering the mics to avoid this in 24-bit, but if you're handing a boom mic to a novice and have a scene where e.g. someone's whispering and another person's screaming, it can be nice to not have to worry about it.