[ardour-users] Greetings and question re: downsampling

[Ichthyostega]

Maluvia wrote:
> We want to try hardware downsampling (as we have not found a dithering algorithm we have been
> happy with),

Hello,

are you sure hardware downsampling will help you? When using softwafe downsampling with dither you
have at least a lot of quality/speed/tradeoff options and different algorithms to choose.
The whole is a difficult (and somewhat controversal) issue, beacuse it depends much on the DA
converter you are listening to for the comparison. Many converters sound a bit different depending
on the rate they are running at.
If you target at CD playback, you should always burn the converted samples on a CD and check
the sound quality on a "realy good" standalone CD player as well...
Some purists state, that the best method for hardware downsampling is to playback the final mix
on a "realy good" 192khz-converter and resample them with a "really good" 44.1kHz-AD-converter

If you reproducably hear a quality difference with your equipment, it may be possible that your
only option is to choose between several forms of degradation ;-)

Cheers,
Hermann