Unfortunately for your post about "you can't hear the difference" -
I can - and so can lots of other people. BTW, there are high res files available for legal download from sites like HDTracks and Chesky that are in 96k and above. So obtaining hi-res isn't dependent on ripping from a CD. DVD-A also exists. Some artists, such as Neil Young, are releasing their music in hi-res formats. I'm sorry you can't hear the difference. Maybe your stereo isn't good enough, or your ears aren't. I'm over 50 and the difference is often striking. It isn't just a matter of high frequencies, but many other aspects of how music sounds. If you want to believe the high school physics about why "we can't hear" anything outside of what a 16/44.1 CD can reproduce, go ahead. But the truth is that psychoacoustics (what we hear) is way more complicated than that. Do a little research and you'll find academic and engineering papers that show otherwise. Quote from Robert Hartley at Avguide.com: "Bob Stuart (degree in psychoacoustics) has shown in a series of AES papers why 16-bit/44.1kHz is insufficient to encode all the information humans can hear. He bases this thesis on models of human hearing that are generally accepted in the psychoacoustic literature. Secondly, although 44.1kHz sampling is perfect in theory for encoding a signal with a bandwidth of 20kHz, in practice 44.1kHz is too slow because of the requirements it puts on filter design. The anti-aliasing filter needs to have no attentuation at 20kHz and more than 100dB of attenuation at 22.05kHz. Such steep filters introduce time-domain distortions. See the AES papers of the early-to-mid 1990's by Mike Storey. Third, there's been a suggestion that although we can't hear sine waves above 20kHz, we can detect the steepness of transient signals that implies a bandwidth greater than 20kHz. We use these steep transient in localizing sounds. Part of the HDCD process (the patent application makes for fascinating reading) encodes in the hidden information channel indicators that a signal's transient leading edge is less steep on the 44.1kHz/16-bit signal compared with the high-res original from which the HDCD-encoded compatible signal is derived. A conjugate process in the decoder restores the transient's orignal rise time." If you're happy with standard CD's, that's great. But don't tell the rest of us what we can and can't hear. And at least admit the possibility that maybe standard CD's aren't the best medium we have available, and hi-res adds something we can perceive. -- firedog Tranquil PC fanless server running SqueezeCenter; SB Duet through Empirical Audio Pace Car; TACT 2.2XP; MF X-150,Sonus Faber Concerto; Mirage MS-12 sub; Dual 506 + Ortofon 20 (occasional use); sometimes use PC with M-Audio 192 as digital source. SB Boom in bedroom. Arcam CD82 which I don't use anymore, even though it's a very good player. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ firedog's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11550 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67679 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
