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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: Truncated experience?

There is a big difference between 50 kHz sampling and 44 kHz sampling. In my experience, going to 48 kHz gives the majority of benefit from higher sampling rates. Beyond that it's a case of diminishing returns, but with modern technology the costs are so low that it makes no sense to go below 88.2 kHz, or even 176.4 kHz. (A few cents per album extra bandwidth and storage cost for an Internet download.) In my experience, sometime you can get good results with 44.1 kHz, but it's a puzzle. There are various choices in filtering that can give you distortion free sound (no aliases), full 20 kHz frequency response, or unsmeared transients (no excessive ringing). Unfortunately, it is only possible to have two out of the three possibilities at this sampling rate. If the recording is such that all three are not really needed, then the final results can be very good, but arguably not excellent.

Meyer and Moran follow an established tradition of audio denialists to dismiss positive findings. However, they are not an extreme examples of this error. There was an AES study that reached the conclusion in the summary that there were no significant differences between high res PCM and DSD, despite the body of the same article pointing out there were a few subjects who could clearly and reliably hear the difference.

If there were money in audio then there would be "scientific" research to "prove" what most of the mastering engineers already know. Most, not all of them, unfortunately. If you can hear the difference you don't need any "authorities" or "peer review" to validate your sense impressions.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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