On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 06:29:02AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote: > there has never been, to my knowledge, any double blind test that has > revealed that any more than a tiny number of individuals (if even > that) can hear the difference between the 4X kHz SR range (44.1, 48 > etc) and the 8X+ kHz SR range (88.2 and above). Two years or so ago there was an in interesting 'engineering report' published in the AES journal. It reported on the results of a long series of listening tests involving hundreds of listeners, all of then selected for their interest in high quality audio. For these tests the authors used 'audiophile' DVD-A recordings (mostly classical music and jazz IIRC), all of them 24-bit, 96 or or 192 kHz, and had the listeners compare them to a version transcoded to CD standards (44.1 kHz, 16 bit). Two results emerged from this: 1. Nobody could hear any difference between the original recordings, reproduced using the best equipment available, and the transcoded versions. 2. Almost all listeners preferred the 'audiophile' recordings to other versions of the same music released on CD. The latter result is quite surprising, but given the first one it says nothing at all about the merits of higher sample rates. It is just the result of the 'audiophile' recordings (targeted at a very critical niche audience) being produced with more attention to audio and musical quality than the average CD. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
