alt Hacker News24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. Running at 44khz loses noticeable high-end content.
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.
Replies
dist-epoch • today at 4:59 PM
No synth generates sawtooths by literally drawing a saw tooth in PCM. The distorsion you get if you do that is not subtle at all.
You can generate perfect band-limited sawtooth waves at 44.1khz, there are multiple techniques for doing this and most production digital synthesizers use them.
Oversampling gives you headroom for aliases for the rest of the synth that is more vulnerable to it.