[ardour-users] Greetings and question re: downsampling

[Maluvia]

>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

Not sure of anything yet.
Your points regarding the complex of factors affectiing the final result are well-taken, and unfortunately there is no objective standard.
At this point, we just need to try both hardware downsampling and various forms of software downsampling, (and perhaps some combination of the two), and *LISTEN*.
One always hopes for an end product that will sound good on anything from boomboxes to audophile systems.
We'll post our results in case it is of interest to others.

-Maluvia