NEED TO KNOW___ Samling Rates___or how to know my digital pedal is not junk.

 HOW IT WORKS

First and most important is I over simplify and never go down rabbit holes to please the the amateur audiophiles. 

This like all my pontifications is to keep you from getting screwed with underperforming junk.

The easiest way to know how basic digital works is by looking at analog movie film. If you have held up a piece of this film to a lamp and looked at it you will see a series of still pictures. In short the camera for film simply took one one picture then another then another etc. There was a moment between each picture that is missing but it is too short a time to notice. We can notice it in general as a lack of detail.

Digital also works by taking pictures. They are called 'samples'. 

SAMPLE THIS 😡 

In the 70's the number of pictures or 'samples' had reached 

44.1 K, this gave birth to the Compact Disc /CD which changed digital from a novelty to a standardized affordable format. The human ear can hear the flaws of it but they are not so annoying as to not find this sound unpleasant. The second rate that came along is 46K. It is generally accepted to truly fool the ear.

That was followed by 96K that does fool the ear. The most recent actually used to any significant degree but not as a readily available consumer product is 192K. You may not hear any difference but perhaps your dog will, LOL.🙉

WHAT ABOUT PEDALS???

Well to get straight to the point The pricy stuff uses 96k and the budget stuff uses 44.1K. No one I know of uses more and if they did we couldn't afford it, LOL.

OTHER FACTORS

We can not hear digital we can only hear things in analog. The sound is picked up from analog. A mic being the obvious example and listened back to from a speaker. So, digital needs digital to analog convertors. Some are good thru high tech and some are acceptable by inventive uses of the right kind of distortion. It is why the first BOSS digital delay pedal sounds better than all but perhaps the very latest. On paper all those in between are rather ...disappointing, LOL. 

 

Another factor is the program material. In plain English a great job making the sound with 44.1K can sound better than a sh@t version of 46K. 

 

Another consideration is one you can not hear unless you play the pedal. All this conversion takes time. If you strike your guitar strings there will be a delay before the sound hits the speakers. Even the best gear has a noticeable amount in that what we call the 'feel' of playing thru the pedal is f.ed up. On the plus side one can soon get over that over time if that delay is short enough.  

BUT!!! You can not get over a lifeless dark sound with no harmonic detail.