[Applejinx]

That would be how you'd go about telling, sure enough. You can't go by 'frequencies' or distortions or anything like that, these analog departures from convincing reality aren't how digital failings manifest.

You try to hear the brickwall by the muffled, enclosed quality and possibly by the weird pre-ring blurriness of the filter making things sound more vague than they have to be, and you hear the truncation not because it is audible 'distortion' as we know it, but because depth collapses and it sounds like it's coming from the speakers and not being a separate space behind/around the speakers. At no point will it be the most glaringly obvious thing but it'll never be 'distortions' as we imagine them, it's more a 'pod people' lack of personality thing.

Like a much subtler version of listening to AI music :)

I'm quite happy with 24/96 as suitable overkill for anything I might want to hear or do. Neil Young went hard on the proposition that 192 was necessary. Sold the Ponoplayer, I had one but it died on me, battery failed eventually. It really did sound awesome beyond just about any other listening device I've ever heard…

[TheOtherHobbes]

24 > 16 is not debatable. Sample rates are more complex because then higher the clock rate the more you get distortions from jitter and the design of the DAC/ADC. Most converters introduce different artefacts at different sample rates, especially at the prosumer end, so you're not comparing like for like.

The last couple of generations of converters have gotten a lot better, so 192kHz today is likely to sound cleaner and smoother than it did ten years ago, where there was a good chance the clock was quite jittery.

Personally I don't think it's worth the extra bandwidth for playback, but I can understand why some people might want it.

Generally all of these "debates" come down to people who think math > circuitry. All real designs are imperfect trade-offs. They all have issues, and arguing as if converters are perfect when they never are, and the imperfections can be benched objectively, is... not very scientific.

[bzzzt]

>Generally all of these "debates" come down to people who think math > circuitry. All real designs are imperfect trade-offs. They all have issues, and arguing as if converters are perfect when they never are, and the imperfections can be benched objectively, is... not very scientific.

There is one purely objective benchmark: a true blind test. You can believe if something is different or not, but if nobody's capably of hearing the difference, does it matter?

[Applejinx]

You're missing a few words. To be correct you would have to have said 'if nobody's capable of hearing the difference every single time beyond a statistical doubt, does it matter?'

You can say that and be correct, while also sounding a little more silly than perhaps you'd like.

edit: rather than go even harder, I'm instead going to suggest it's perfectly fine to care about things you don't hear every single time, but still like or dislike :)

My pet example is sand in the lettuce for a salad. If you dislike that particular cronch against your teeth while eating salad, it has a spectacular ability to ruin your enjoyment of your salad, even though you don't perceive it every single time. Digital distortions are like that for some of us, things like wow and flutter and vinyl surface noise are like that for others. People vary. (which is also why not to generalize about what 'people can hear')

[bzzzt]

Oh, I care about audio quality a lot more than most people, but not into 'magic cable' territory.

There's no reason you can't gather statistics about a representative part of the population. It doesn't make sense to make the entire world pay for better audio because some guy somewhere might be a bit more sensitive and he thinks it ruins everything.

I don't know if such a person exists, but especially in the 'magic' audio territory there's a big amount of bullsh*t going on. There's a reason the James Randi price was never claimed.

There's a huge difference between digital 'distortions' caused by sampling at CD quality and things like tape flutter which most people can actually hear. Even then, some people like the imperfections like vinyl or tape artifacts. Some people even prefer MP3 compressed music.