MusicReasonProduction, Synthesis, and Audio Math
What's the highest frequency this sample rate can represent?
Enter a sample rate. This tool calculates its Nyquist frequency and, optionally, checks whether a test frequency sits within that representable range.
Answer
Want to learn more? Frequency, Sampling, Nyquist, and Spectra
Understand
A signal below the Nyquist frequency is not automatically captured cleanly: real-world anti-aliasing filtering, quantization, and a browser's own resampling behavior all still matter. This tool states the theoretical ceiling only, not a guarantee about actual capture quality.
Worked examples
44,100 Hz gives a Nyquist frequency of 22,050 Hz. 48,000 Hz gives 24,000 Hz. Most human hearing tops out well below either ceiling, which is part of why these two rates dominate consumer and production audio.
Method and limitations
Nyquist frequency is simply sampleRate / 2. The Web Audio API's decodeAudioData() may resample decoded audio to the AudioContext's own sample rate, so a browser does not always use exactly the rate a file was recorded at; check the actual AudioContext sample rate when precision matters.
Why aliasing matters even below Nyquist
A content frequency sitting comfortably under the Nyquist ceiling is only captured cleanly if it was properly band-limited before sampling; energy that sneaks in above Nyquist folds back down into the audible range as false, unrelated frequencies rather than simply disappearing. That folding, aliasing, is exactly why real analog-to-digital converters include a physical anti-aliasing filter ahead of the sampling stage, a step this calculator's math does not itself perform or verify.