On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 11:49:07 +0100, Chris Stiles wrote:

Is there a particularly sample/bit rate or rate limit that the various VST and
plugin manufacturers optimise their plugins for in terms of sonic quality?

I've variously heard people say that lots of commercial plugins are optimised
for either 16bit 44.1khz or 16bit 48khz and start sounding grainy when used
above these rates.

All audio communication to a VST plugin is always 32bit float between -1
and +1. The bit depth of your recorded audio is irrelevant as virtually
all DAWs work at 32bit float for their internal mixing and routing.

The host informs the plugin of sample rate changes via setSampleRate, and
the plugin should accept any sample rate required.

I've had a few old plugins do strange things or crash when I try to use
them at 96k, but that's pretty rare nowadays. If the plugin sounds strange
at 96k then it's not optimized for lower rates, but broken at higher ones.