Question / Help What audio sampling rate to use? 44.1khz/48khz?

[WilliamBarrows]

What audio sampling should I use in OBS? What does it depend on? So far I've simply been using 48khz since it's the highest setting.

I heard that (besides really high frequencies only very young people can even hear) there isn't that much of an advantage of 48khz over 44.1khz, since it already covers pretty much all audible frequencies. Is this the case for OBS or does 48khz provide any other advantages I'm not aware of?

Assuming there really isn't any difference between sampling rates in quality the only question would become resampling. So if everything you use has the same sampling rate nothing has to do resampling, resulting in recording that is more efficient and less likely to fail due to some bad resampling, right? Now does this mean I should simply set my windows sound devices all to 48khz so OBS doesn't have to resample, or does this simply force my windows to resample my sound instead of OBS?

EDIT: I'm primarily asking this with my local recording setup in mind, but I assume it would be pretty much the same for streaming anyways.

 

[FerretBomb]

48KHz was added to accommodate a few audio devices that didn't support 44.1KHz mode recording (the former standard). It's generally not worth bothering with IMO, and dropping to 44.1KHz is still recommended in my mind. Not sure why the default was switched to 48, when it was meant to address an edge-case.

 

[WilliamBarrows]

48KHz was added to accommodate a few audio devices that didn't support 44.1KHz mode recording (the former standard).

So 44.1khz was the former standard or 48khz? If 44.1khz was the old standard then that'd mean most game audio is stored at that sampling rate anyways, so there would be no gain in using 48khz. It'd actually be a disadvantage since using 48khz would force the game's sounds to be resampled, right?

Anyways, thanks for your quick answer. I'm probably gonna use 44.1khz in the future unless someone else makes a good point about why 48khz is better.

Not sure why the default was switched to 48, when it was meant to address an edge-case.

I heard about that too, would be nice if a dev could give a better insight on this strange choice of default.

 

[FerretBomb]

44.1khz was the old default for OBS. Many older games indeed are optimized for 44.1khz (I don't know too many that go out of their way to provide 48; most just focus on multichannel and space savings).

Someone had a mic/mixing board/audio interface that refused to work at 44.1 (crashed things badly) and required 48. So Jim added in 48 mode.
Again, no idea why it was made the default; 44.1 uses the audio bitrate more effectively for audible sound anyway. I manually switched myself back over when I noticed it had been updated for me. :b

 

[Lain]

48 shouldn't be the default as far as I know. I thought 44.1hz was the default. If I did do it then I don't remember why. 44.1hz as far as I know is a bit more common than 48k.

 

[WilliamBarrows]

Could be that on a fresh installation 44.1khz would be the default, as I recall my install was just from an update so something may have gotten messed up. Or maybe I remembered wrong, don't worry about it too much.

So does this mean you, as the developer, can confirm that we should generally use 44.1khz in all cases unless we HAVE to use 48khz for technical reasons? If so it may be a good idea to put the setting in the advanced tab, so unexperienced users don't accidentally change the setting thinking more is better, eventhough they actually end up making things worse (48khz produces worse quality at the same bitrate than 44.1khz, besides losing very high frequencies of course).

 

[sendblink23]

The current default is indeed 48k

 

[Fantus_Longhorn]

Can confirm that the default is 48khz as well. Just completed a fresh install of Windows so there's definitely no pre-existing settings.

 

[Timothy003]

48 shouldn't be the default as far as I know. I thought 44.1hz was the default. If I did do it then I don't remember why. 44.1hz as far as I know is a bit more common than 48k.

PCs ship with 48 kHz by default.

 

[WilliamBarrows]

PCs ship with 48 kHz by default.

You mean OBS on PC or PC hardware? If PC hardware indeed ships with 48khz it'd make sense to have OBS at that default. All my hardware was configured for 44.1khz originally, before I changed it to 48khz manually because I was using that in OBS.

So does this mean you, as the developer, can confirm that we should generally use 44.1khz in all cases unless we HAVE to use 48khz for technical reasons?

 

[Timothy003]

You mean OBS on PC or PC hardware? If PC hardware indeed ships with 48khz it'd make sense to have OBS at that default. All my hardware was configured for 44.1khz originally, before I changed it to 48khz manually because I was using that in OBS.

Do you have the right sound drivers installed? Microsoft's generic driver defaults to 44.1 kHz.

48 kHz is recommended because it's easily convertible from 8, 16, and 32 kHz, which are used by telephone and VoIP. In practice, it doesn't really matter; no one can tell the difference. I would stick with 48 kHz, since that's the default and everyone's PC is using it. If you use 44.1 kHz, your viewers will resample the audio – not ideal. Also, some USB microphones don't support 44.1 kHz at all.

 

[vbdkv]

Ever since installing Windows 7 my audio defaults to 48khz, so in order to free up resources, so obs does not need to convert audio to 44.1, I pick 48.

 

[FerretBomb]

Er... PCs absolutely do not ship 'with 48KHz by default'. No idea where that came from. It's available, but most audio drivers default to 44.1 as 48 simply isn't needed.

The changeover to 48 as the OBS default was apparently a mistake on the Devs' part, as noted up above.

 

[vbdkv]

Er... PCs absolutely do not ship 'with 48KHz by default'. No idea where that came from. It's available, but most audio drivers default to 44.1 as 48 simply isn't needed.

The changeover to 48 as the OBS default was apparently a mistake on the Devs' part, as noted up above.

That must have been back in the XP era I reckon. Even when using god awful onboard sound such as Realtek, it defaults to 48khz using Windows 7. My SB Z certainly likes 48khz as well and who am I to argue?

 

[FerretBomb]

Nope, Win7-64 Ult at home here, and it defaults to 44.1KHz unless you go in and change it.
Checked a couple of workstations as well, and they're the same. Though to be fair, they're email-box Dell machines with onboard audio. Sounds like your SB Z drivers fiddled it.

 

[vbdkv]

Nope, Win7-64 Ult at home here, and it defaults to 44.1KHz unless you go in and change it.
Checked a couple of workstations as well, and they're the same. Though to be fair, they're email-box Dell machines with onboard audio. Sounds like your SB Z drivers fiddled it.

I just reinstalled Windows 7 on 2 machines, both defaults to 48khz .. Not that it matters much, if any, just make sure your inputs (microphones) are using the same khz or you'll get "ping" noise when the audio card/chip downsaples it.

 

[WilliamBarrows]

I just reinstalled Windows 7 on 2 machines, both defaults to 48khz .. Not that it matters much, if any, just make sure your inputs (microphones) are using the same khz or you'll get "ping" noise when the audio card/chip downsaples it.

My guess is it depends on something in your hardware rather than your OS. My computer came with 44.1khz like Ferret's.

I've done some reading on sampling rates in general (this for example) and it turns out 44.1khz is more than enough to cover all audible frequencies. The only reason why 48khz was ever created was because of older converters being bad and needing more headroom than 44.1khz would provide, but with modern technology (most notably oversampling) 44.1khz is more than enough. So just as a file format 44.1khz is good enough and doesn't cost you any quality compared to 48khz. Personally I hope at least one of the two eventually dies out so we will have only one standard, and seeing that with modern technology 44.1khz is enough and also produces around 7% smaller files I'd vote for that.

Considering all this it's probably smartest to just set OBS to record/stream at whatever sampling rate your desktop sound is running at, or 44.1khz for youtube since it usually resamples to that.

 

[vbdkv]

I honestly have no idea where you get 44.1 from - It's CD stuff, it's friggin old. Standards aside, XP and above default to 48khz.

 

[Boildown]

Just use whatever setting your computer's audio or your game is set to. If you want to make everything perfectly ideal, then set your computer audio, game, and OBS to 44.1 for the reasons noted above. However the difference is so minor, compatibility trumps the small increase in bit savings or performance, so if you have something (USB microphone for example) that only records at 48, set everything to 48.

 

[WilliamBarrows]

I honestly have no idea where you get 44.1 from - It's CD stuff, it's friggin old. Standards aside, XP and above default to 48khz.

My windows is old, pretty much got it when windows 7 came out, but I can confirm that all my sound devices were at 44.1khz. Might be my sound devices' fault, who knows.

48khz isn't that new either (DVDs were invented in 1995) and the original reason why it was used no longer applies, plus 44.1khz is still widely used, many modern games still use it, MP3 is generally 44.1khz (IIRC MP3 actually doesn't accept anything other than 44.1khz), etc... Most audio you'll find is probably 44.1khz. Even youtube resamples to 44.1khz, and I assume at least about half of all video you have watched and audio you have heard in your life was on youtube. 48khz offers no additonal quality, but it doesn't hurt either. The only reasons why 48khz would be better would be 8, 16, and 32khz resampling to it more easily, or maybe that it's a rounder number. I guess we'll see what will win as a global standard in the end.

Just use whatever setting your computer's audio or your game is set to. If you want to make everything perfectly ideal, then set your computer audio, game, and OBS to 44.1 for the reasons noted above. However the difference is so minor, compatibility trumps the small increase in bit savings or performance, so if you have something (USB microphone for example) that only records at 48, set everything to 48.

Sounds like a good conclusion, whatever you use just use the same for everything to avoid unnecessary resampling.