| xiphmont's primary goal appears to be to stop Neil Young from selling 24/192 audio to the general public; that's why he called the page neil-young.html. Sure, few buyers have the ears or equipment to pursue anything beyond the compact disc. The problem is that many readers of neil-young.html will come away thinking they understand human hearing and digital sampling, when in fact the article is far too sparse on details to understand either; there is no discussion of how sounds are located in 3D space, or of how phase information is recovered. It is amazing that you can completely cover one ear, rub your fingers together behind your head and precisely pinpoint where your fingers are. It is also amazing that "Sampling doesn't affect frequency response or phase" but xiphmont doesn't explain this at all. And then there's this lovely quote: "It's true enough that a properly encoded Ogg file (or MP3, or AAC file) will be indistinguishable from the original at a moderate bitrate." which is provably wrong. I can very reliably pick the uncompressed WAV each try when compared against 320kbps MP3. My attitude is in support of furthering research in the area of live sound reproduction. As I've said, we are VERY far away right now. It is foolish to believe we understand human musical perception completely today. We cannot even replicate a simple cymbal strike with today's recording and playback technology. I would encourage the curious to stand in the center of an outdoor arc of 100 horn players, like this (feel free to skip first 48 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EDIDCdy5Es Once you experience that live, try to figure out how to replicate the input to your two ears. You can't, without 100 brass players. Interestingly, these two examples of trumpet and cymbal have significant ultrasonic frequency content: https://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm I don't believe it's a coincidence. |