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To quote directly from the Master himself, Bob Katz, at
www.digido.com

II. The Source-Quality Rule

This article is about getting "more bits" into our recordings, but there's a powerful opposite pressure to use an inferior-sounding, low-bit-rate (data compressed) delivery medium for home audio, radio, and for the Internet. Personally, I wish lossy data compression could be outlawed; while that won't happen, at least let's keep on lobbying for sound quality. One way to maintain quality is to follow this important rule: Source recordings and masters should have higher resolution than the eventual release medium. There's always a loss down the line, due to cumulative processing and lossy transmission techniques. For example, consider a lossy medium like the analog cassette. Dub to cassette from a high quality source, like a CD, and it sounds much better than a copy from an inferior source, like the FM radio. In other words, the higher the audio quality you begin with, the better the final product, whether it's an audiophile CD, a multimedia CD-ROM, or a talking Barbie doll.

Get ready for high-resolution release media, like DVD, by following this source-quality rule. Prepare for DVD (and make better CDs in the process), by making your masters now with longer wordlength storage and processing, and if possible, high sample rates. The 96 kHz/24 bit medium has even more analog-like qualities, greater warmth, depth, transparency, and apparent sonic ease than 44.1 kHz. Perhaps it's due to the relaxed filtering requirements, perhaps it's due to the increased bandwidth-regardless, the proof is in the listening. Therefore, produce your master at the highest resolution, and at the end (the production master), use a single process to reduce the wordlength or sample rate. Multiple processes deteriorate quality more than a single reduction at the end.

For example, your multimedia CD ROMs will sound much better if you work at 44.1 kHz/24 bits or higher, even if you must downsample to 11.05 kHz/8 bits at the end. Plus you've preserved your investment for the future. Your master will be ready for DVD-ROM, whose higher storage capacity will permit a higher resolution delivery medium.

Even the 16-bit Compact Disc, can sound better than what most of us are doing today. We're actually compromising the sound of our 16-bit CDs by starting with 16-bit recording. It's the reason why I've been a strong advocate of wide-track, high speed analog tape and/or 24-bit/96 kHz recording and mixing techniques. You can hear the difference; I've already produced several incredible-sounding CDs working at 96 kHz until the last step.

Working at 96 kHz/24 bit is prohibitively expensive for most of today's projects. The DAWs have half the mixing and filtering power, half the storage time, and outboard digital processors for 96 kHz have barely been invented. As a result, work time is more than doubled, and storage costs are quadrupled (due to the need for intermediate captures). I have no doubt that will change in the next few years. So at Digital Domain, most of the time we can't work at 96 kHz, but we still follow the source-quality rule as much as is practical. Clients are beginning to bring in 20-bit mixes at 44.1 or 48 kHz, and especially 1/2" analog tapes, from which we can get incredible results. The majority of mixes arrive on DAT, and we still get happy client faces and superb results by following the rule. When clients bring in 16-bit source DATs, we work with high-resolution techniques, some of them proprietary, to minimize the losses in depth, space, dynamics, and transient clarity of the final 16-bit medium. The result: better-sounding CDs.

Recently, another advance in the audio art was introduced, a digital equalizer which employs double-sampling technology. This digital equalizer accepts up to a 24-bit word at 44.1 kHz (or 48K), upsamples it to to 88.2 (96), performs longword EQ calculations, and before output, resamples back to 44.1/24-bits. I was very skeptical, thinking that these heavy calculations would deteriorate sound, but this equalizer won me over. Its sound is open in the midrange, because of demonstrably low distortion products. The improvement is measurable and quite audible, more...well... analog, than any other digital equalizer I've ever heard. This confirms the hypothesis of Dr. James A. (Andy) Moorer of Sonic Solutions, "[in general], keeping the sound at a high sampling rate, from recording to the final stage will...produce a better product, since the effect of the quantization will be less at each stage". In other words, errors are spread over a much wider bandwidth, therefore we notice less distortion in the 20-20K band. Sources of such distortion include cumulative coefficient inaccuracies in filter (eq), and level calculations.

88.2 kHz reissues will sound better than the CD original
The above evidence implies that record companies are sitting on a new goldmine. Even old, 16-bit/44.1 session tapes can exhibit more life and purity of tone if properly reprocessed and reissued on a 20-bit (24-bit) 88.2 kHz DVD. In addition, by retaining the output wordlength at 24 bits, it will be unnecessary to add additional degrading 16-bit dither to the product. Many of these older 16-bit tapes were produced with 20-bit accurate A/Ds and dithered to 16 bits; they already have considerable resolution below the 16th bit.