No, it applies to all directions. Please don’t teach me physics, I’m a physicist. No kidding.
You may be, but that doesn’t automatically make you correct. When waves superimpose at the ear drum, what you hear is additive. It does not matter how they continue on in this context.
In order to cancel sound, you have to apply the same frequencies with opposite phases. What you said earlier is that higher frequencies affect lower frequencies, and that’s false. They will both continue to exist and exert their separate influence.
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Well I guess we will just disagree on this then. But thanks for being civil 
I appreciate the discussion
I’m trying to understand how high-res can sound better. I can’t hear it myself but accept that others can. Assuming that it’s the possibility of better filters in the reproducing DAC and not the content above our hearing capabilities would upsampling have the same effect? That would save a lot of space (and money) but I guess there must be more to it than that?
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At 71 I have no chance of hearing anything beyond 5 kHz , add in a lifetime or aural abuse with loud music and you get to the lowest common denominator.
The one good point John made is that mastering counts far more. I have albums at CD that sound great, I have 24/192 that sound like fingernails on a blackboard
Each to their own, if you can genuinely tell the difference then go for it, I’m not going to actively downsample my hi res to CD but for me it wouldn’t make any difference other than a few gigs of disc space
Just my 2p …
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I would imagine with a high-end system, it would be easier to tell the difference between CD and Hi-Res, but on my system, I cannot. (Mid-fi living-room system, not an esoteric audiophile room.)
For streaming Qobuz and Tidal through Roon, I’ve dropped the SQ back down to CD Quality as I have no interest in MQA, and I find that the streams are more reliable to some of the devices on the network if I stick with 16/44.1. (I DO notice a difference with HQPlayer, tho.)
Not sure how it works tho.
If something started out at 16/44.1, how upsampling that would make it sound better, I have no idea. But if it was recorded in 24/192, then I could understand you might lose something going back down. (Whether everyone could hear that or not, I don’t know.)
Well Apple Music recently started supporting Lossless Alac at up to 24/192 for the same price. While I enjoyed Tidal for new music it just doesn’t have old Stones, Who, Genesis, Gabriel, Santana, ETC. So filled my phone with HQ music with 1090 artists and 4118 Albums in my library I dropped the subscription. Then stopped listening to music in my Car as it sounded thin. Then Apple started supporting Lossless audio, again am listening to streaming music. Just watch your Data plan.
Yes, I’m saying you can’t, especially if you’re over 50 but even if not, I’d bet hard cash. Not only that, I bet you can’t tell a difference that’s even more stark, MP3 v. Lossless. Take this quiz and record the results with screenshots as it’s happening if you care to be transparent with your results: How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? : The Record : NPR
Well…I’m 69 and I got all but one right. I think I botched the Neil Young cut, that’s a tough one. But cymbals, snare, piano attack, more natural sounding vocals and back ground sounds all jumped out at me. Listening on my Radio Shack radio hooked to my PC.
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Well, that perfectly summarizes the insatiable need to feel special. As technology advances, more and more high-end features make it to the mainstream, and fewer and fewer features are left for the elites. Hi-res, MQA, super-expensive cables, transports, servers, or ridiculous old technology like turntables with super-heavy platters or super-expensive phono cartridges and preamps are just ways for the industry to cater for the special few.
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If you truly cannot hear a difference then consider yourself lucky!
You just saved yourself a ton of cash because all you need is a $50 CCA hockey puck off eBay to stream.
Even that’s more than you need as it does 24/96 but I could not think of anything cheaper!
I’m a little confused by one aspect of this conversation. Specifically, what difference does an individual’s range of hearing - whether it’s capped at 5,000 hz or extends up to 20,000 - make to that person’s ability to hear, and appreciate, high res music?
Isn’t the 44 in 16/44 a statement that the music was sampled 44,000 times a second? Just as the 16 means that each sample has 16 bits of amplitude? So that music designated as 24/96 was sampled 96,000 times a second and has potentially 24 bits of amplitude for each sample?
In a nutshell, then, the 24/96 version has more information, regardless of the frequency of the music or the frequencies you can hear. This says nothing about whether you can perceive that extra information, or whether it sounds good to you if you can. Just that whatever range you can hear has more information in the 24/96 version than in 16/44.
(Personally, I think the ability to perceive the extra information has more to do with training and experience than anything else.)
I don’t mean this as an argument for hi-res, however. I have 16/44, 24/96, and 24/192 versions of some albums - Beggar’s Banquet, for example - and think the 24/192 is unlistenable while the 24/96 is sublime. So for me it really comes down to the quality of the initial recording and any re-mastering that might have been done since.
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Thank you! The tendency to feel special is an important thing for me (BTW, don’t have very expensive audio gear.)
I actually think a good recording/mastering is more important than the medium it’s released on.
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Chuck, when people bring up hearing range, they are almost certainly thinking about the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem, which describes the mathematics behind digital encoding and decoding of audio. The Theorem states that the original analog signal can be reconstructed perfectly from a digital encode for all frequencies up to half of the sampling rate. This means that the 44.1 kHz sampling rate used for “CD quality” is capable of reproducing up to 22,050 Hz, which is at or above the maximum frequency that most people can hear. However, the very young (e.g, children and teens) may be able to hear up to around 25 kHz, so high-res encoding may have some benefits for them. The other consideration is that high-res encoding at 48, 88.2, or 96 kHz provides some “headroom” so that high-pass filters used in the DAC are less likely to interfere with audio quality. In my opinion, middle-aged people who claim to hear “dramatic differences” in high-res encodings are either imagining it, or are actually hearing the effects of better mastering.
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Tidal has every studio album released by all of those artists, at least here in Canada.
I agree completely. For me, I served my time in the music biz and stood next to many great musicians and instruments. I also saw and heard artists from Hendrix and Mountain at the Atlanta Pop Festival to Alison Krauss and Yo Yo Ma at Town Hall and the Allmans many times while standing on the side of the stage. What these these artists and instruments really sound like is burned into my memory and I can testify the sound had a robust amount of information and energy. While I am perfectly happy to listen to music on Alexa while visiting a friend, my set up is a bit over the top out of necessity if I want a satisfyingly listening experience. (And I’m thrilled I can still hear pretty well).
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This gentleman explained this pretty well.
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Even if some people can hear over 20kHz, the acuity there is so low, you’d have to have a significant amount of energy at those frequencies to make a difference. Music has little or no energy there, even with the added noise due to 16bit noise shaping, so in the end there is no benefit of higher sampling rates or bit depths.
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I think, the right question, if Hi-Res Music is relevant for the consumer segment.
a) Look at the audio production pipeline and check, if relevant content is encoded above 20 KHz and if the dynmic range exceeds 96 dB. If your content would exceed the 96 dB the problem can seriously be that your ears will be just killed, so this would be a definite one time experience.
b) Check if your speakers transmit content above 20 KHz. 99,9 % (even high end speakers) do not transmit information above 20 KHz. The content will be just filtered.
c) “DSPing” might create a better sound image for the individual. This can be the effect of MQA, but would be also true for any tweaks like Dirac etc. The same is true for any image correction , when taking a picture via your smart phone. Look for comparisons between the raw capture of the image sensor and the outcome via iOS or Android.
d) There is no higher information density which is benefical for human ears. Signal theory has answered this. You can reject these theories and develop your own, but then you have to fund your own studios and rerecord your roon library based on “your” theory.
In my experience, we’ve discovered signifcant differences between different masters and speaker sets. We can hear clear differences, but there is never a consensus in a test group if A sounds better than B…
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