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Comment by abainbridge | Hacker News Reader

> Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference.

Do you have an explanation of how that is possible? On the face of it, CD seems to have more SNR and frequency response than necessary. I've got intelligent friends on both sides of the debate, but I've never heard a plausible explanation from the "I promise I can tell the difference" friends. I tend to believe Monty Montgomery (of Ogg Vorbis fame). After watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qFjdQP7Ep0 there's little obvious room for doing better than CD. The best explanation I've heard is that CD mastering is generally aimed at mainstream equipment, and therefore isn't optimal for good equipment.

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I can explain. On stereo you will be hard pressed by most people. The issue is where and how is everything done from recording all the way to mastering.

Technically here is how it works. CDs are at 44.1khz sample rate and you record at 96khz back in 2000s, similar how video recordings are 8k for 4k or 1080p. Then when you exported your mix to be mastered it would get knocked down to 44.1khz not very noticeable in the least unless you listened to stuff all day everyday and had to train your ear to hear everything.

If you compare the two 96khz and 44.1khz there is a distinct difference BUT it is not something that people would care about because their equipment only gives a clarity of less than 44.1khz. My system from recording all the way to audio output and DAC were 96khz and cost my thousands and thousands of dollars.

I do believe that you can tell when you hear the two. Kind of like how FLAC and MP3 sound different on my LG V20 phone.

But the question remains. Given Nyquist theorem and an upper limit to human ear response, what is the advantage of going over ~40kHZ? I understand you can encode more information, but decoding to higher frequencies than we can hear doesn't seem (to the novice) to be beneficial. Do we somehow 'detect' harmonics above what we can hear? Or is the extra information used to process something else differently, like the relative volumes of two slightly different instruments making a note at the same pitch? It's an interesting question IMO.

EDIT: upper ear response is presumably limited to ~20 kHz

You are right about upper ear response.

I can tell the difference with my now-old ears, if it is a good recording of real-world instruments in a common space.

That is a lot of qualifiers, but on playback you can ‘feel’ that other space.

I believe that it is because of the way that the higher frequency components of the sound interact with the environment and effectively down-transpose and affect the rest of the signal before they hit the listener’s ear.

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