sbgk wrote:my view is that I can only hear up to 16KHz, so any perceived improvement due to hirez is due to the increased no of samples. I like 24/192, but the data volumes are quite large, 24/96 seems a good compromise, 16/44 sounds quite rough in comparison.
I'm sure there are contesting views about the ability of the human ear/brain to hear the difference between the varying sample rates, but there you go.
Quite so:
http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~kunchur/pa ... Foster.pdf
"Many misconceptions and mysteries surround the perception and reproduction of musical sounds. Specifications such as frequency response and certain common distortions provide an inadequate indication of the sound quality, whereas accuracy in the time domain is known to significantly influence audio transparency. [...] Our recent behavioral studies on human subjects proved that humans can discern timing alterations on a 5 microsecond time scale, indicating that the digital sampling rates used in consumer audio are insufficient for fully preserving transparency."
this article states that people can discern sounds that are only about 6 microseconds apart. According to the article the consequence of this capability is that sample frequency should be above 166 kHz to maintain the transparency of the original sound and avoid sound smearing which was not in the original sound.
So it has to do with the
timing aspect of the signal and not with tone
frequency represented by that number.
The test was done to generate a 7 kHz sound pulse and listen to that through two speakers. Then they moved one of the speakers by milimeters at a time and check when the person (doing the test blinded) could differentiate between the sound coming from each speaker.
A few other quotes:
Audio Quality in Networked Systems / Sampling Issues / Temporal resolution (
http://www.yamahaproaudio.com/global/en ... o_quality/)
"In the professional live audio field, a 48 kHz sampling rate is adopted as standard, with some devices supporting multiples of this rate: 96khz and 192kHz. (Some devices also support 44.1 khz and 88.2 kHz for compatibility with the music recording field, eg. the Compact Disk). However, apart from the temporal resolution of a digital part of an audio system, the temporal characteristics of the electro-acoustic components of a system also have to be considered. In general, only very high quality speaker systems specially designed for use in a music studio are capable of reproducing temporal resolutions down to 6 microseconds assumed that the listener is situated on-axis of the loudspeakers (the sweet spot). For the average high quality studio speaker systems, a temporal resolution of 10 microseconds might be the maximum possible. Live sound reinforcement speaker systems in general can not support such high temporal resolutions for several reasons. "
http://recordinghacks.com/articles/the- ... ond-20khz/
"Many engineers have been trained to believe that human hearing receives no meaningful input from frequency components above 20kHz. I have read many irate letters from such engineers insisting that information above 20kHz is clearly useless ..."
"Human hearing is generally, I believe, misunderstood to be primarily a frequency analysis system. The prevalent model of human hearing presumes that auditory perception is based on the brain’s interpretation of the outputs of a frequency analysis system ..."
"The human hearing system uses waveform as well as frequency to analyze signals. It is important to maintain accurate waveform up to the highest frequency region with accurate reproduction of details down to 5µs to 10µs."
http://www.audiostream.com/content/qa-b ... recordings
"When I first heard properly done 24/192, it was a jaw dropper. For the first time in my experience, those reservations I have always had about digital, where I felt there were some things the best analog did better, simply evaporated. This is, to my ears, a bigger jump up in quality over 24/96 than that was over 16/44. It no longer feels like a great digital recorder or a great analog recorder. It feels like the recorder has been effectively removed from the equation and I am listening directly to the mic feed."