The Audirvana app which I use for playing files has an audio analyzer. Below are the results for the opening track from the latest Decemberists album, which I downloaded at 24/96. You can see that while the album was mastered at 24/96, the tracks were recorded at less than 48khz. I have many albums that look like this.
My question is: why? With today’s computer technology, recording at 24/96 shouldn’t be difficult. Even home recording hobbyists can do it. So why wouldn’t a recording engineer working in a professional studio match the recording sampling rate to the mastering sampling rate? Are they just being lazy? Do they think it doesn’t matter because most people will be listening at 16/44.1?
