The Downsides Of High Definition Recording - Alesis iO14 Reference Manual

3. Archiving: If you're capturing a special recording that may
have some historical value in the future, it makes sense to
capture it with the highest level of technical accuracy.
Alesis has designed your IO14/26 to sound excellent at all
sample rates. Decide for yourself if the benefits and
tradeoffs are worth it for a particular session.

The Downsides of High Definition Recording

1. Disk Usage – Recording at high sample rates consumes hard
disk space much more quickly than standard rates. The
following table describes sampling rate vs. disk usage for a
60-second snippet of monophonic (1 track) audio:
Length Bit Depth
60 Seconds 24 bit
60 Seconds 24 bit
60 Seconds 24 bit
60 Seconds 24 bit
60 Seconds 24 bit
60 Seconds 24 bit
You can see how this may become a problem on large
musical projects. For example, whereas a 5-minute song with
16 channels of 24-bit audio would require up to 635MB to
record at 44.1k, the same song would need approximately
2.54 gigabytes of storage if you're recording at 176.4k!
We recommend that you take a look at your available hard
disk resources when deciding which sampling rate to use.
You can use the following formula to estimate the total disk
space required for a song:
Song length (in seconds) X Number of Channels X
Sampling Rate X 3
So... Our hypothetical 5-minute song would be calculated in
the following way:
300 sec x 16 channels x 44,100 x 3 = 635,040,000 byes (about
635 MB)
That same song recorded at 176.4k would be:
300 sec x 16 channels x 176,400 x 3 = 2,540,160,000 bytes (or
2.54 GB)
Getting In Deeper: Recording
Sampling Rate Disk Usage
44.1k 7.9 MB
48k 8.6 MB
88.2k 15.9 MB
96k 17.3 MB
176.4k 31.8 MB
192k 34.6 MB
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