My mother can't tell the difference at all. I'm pretty sure this is just something that only a subset of the population notices enough to care about.

However, similar to how we perceive ultra low frequency more as a physical vibration than as sound, these harmonics above 20 kHz are probably merely annoying and subtly felt and impact one major issue of enjoyability - listening fatigue. So maybe we don't want those frequencies from a musical perspective anyway.

Regardless, there's hardly any equipment in use by even "audiophiles" on full-blown analog setups that can faithfully reproduce sounds beyond 30 kHz because of electronics design limitations in themselves rather than an analog-digital end user recording format distinction. In fact, a lot of vinyl historically had to be mastered with a low-pass filter cutting off a lot of the high frequencies because historically with sufficiently high enough energy in high frequencies, the needle would be tougher to control and fly right off the track sometimes (one explanation I read from an audio engineer - really not sure about that logic, but there's definitely low AND high pass filtering on vinyl that makes it lower fidelity in many respects than the master).

Heck, most vinyl produced since the 70s comes from digital masters in the first place. http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Myt...

Bugs the crap out of me to see people claim vinyl is superior on technical merits rather than aesthetic ones (sound preference / taste is real). You'd think they're climate change deniers with their insistence and rhetoric. But this is what I meant by purists about the "original" - higher fidelity and clarity is oftentimes not what people desire.