Sound Devices 702T bit rate setting to 192 Khz - overkill?

L

lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com

Well-known member
Just got the Sound Devices 702T. Plugged in the Schoeps CMIT5U on ch1. The recording is extremely clean. It has a unique sonic characteristic that I can't never get out of my 2/3" or 1/3" cam. Definitely will bring this on all high profile future interview shoots. This thing blows away the cam's XLR mic input in quality. Used to think the cam's audio is good but when I hear this, my perception on separate audio recorder changed overnight. SMPTE TC is a breeze to sync up. It is simply delightful to listen to. The only issue now is that should I ever need to use 24bit/192Khz? I record mostly ambient sound and dialogue. I read there are many who said 192 Khz is for animal ears and wasted hdd space. But I don't have any budget problem w/ hdd capacity. The question here is that is the 192 Khz is a true 192 Khz or up sampled from 96 Khz?
 
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For dialog and ambient sound beds, 24-bit/48kHz is all you need. The only time to think about getting into 96kHz or 192kHz is for effects recording with sources that are going to go through some pretty hefty post-processing (especially for pitch and time).
 
I concur w/ Alex, 24-bit/48kHz is more than adequate for dialog. Even 16 bit would be adequate if the record levels are ok. Without elaborating, probably even better than budget recorders @24 bit.
 
To answer your second question the 192 is not upsampled from 96. But what are you recording up there? The mic is not picking up any significant sound over maybe 30k and that is really pushing it.

So what you get are more samples to play with for things like slowing the sound way down and not getting it too gritty. Which is why everyone is saying not to record dialog up there. Nobody in post wants to see dialog coming to them over 48k/24.

Now if your doing it all your self and noone is going to do post sound you can do whatever you want. But if you are handing it off to sound post they are probably going to sample rate convert your stuff down to 48k (and charge you for the time). It's not just HD space it's system responsiveness and the fact that EVERYTHING else in the session will need to be upconverted to 192 and that is a lot of wasted time that will produce no discernible benefit.
 
Majority of the sound will be done by myself. So don't mind the 192 Khz. But it's a waste anyway. After several helpful suggestions fr Alex & Rick, I'll set it down to 48Khz-96Khz. Other scenario I'd use is recording musical instruments (drums, violin, clarinet) and choir. I think 48Khz-96Khz@24-bit will be plenty. Other mics will be the legacy AKG 414-ULS TL2, Perception. Those are for the instruments. Too bad that the 192 Khz is left to waste. Not sure why SD devices put it there in the first place. Perhaps for that super rare recording that once in a blue moon will be used or they simply want to tell the pros that SD has 192 Khz but NO pragmatic real world use.
 
192 is used fairly often these days by FX recordists and those were the first people SD was selling to. You also get some benefit even at 48 because the converters for 192 need to be better. Also some music people record at 192. Personally I'm not sold on it's usefulness for most things but if your selling sounds the market is really moving to at least 96 as a delivery spec.
 
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