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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

A sampling rate of 192kHz is overkill. And 192KHz exists as a sample rate in audio world because it is overkill.

With a Nyquist frequency of ~96KHz, all of the arguments about whether a person can hear up to eg 22.05KHz, 24KHz, or if there's something meaningful all the way up at 48KHz, become completely and totally ameliorated.

Those arguments were always such tiresome ordeals.

The cost of dissolving those arguments is just some some bandwidth and CPU cycles -- which is to say, it costs approximately nothing.

Please let the man cook. :)

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Oh it's worse than that, for distribution and playback sampling at more than 48kHz is likely worse in many ways due to unwanted ultrasonic noise and increased intermodulation distortion. 96/24 makes sense for production, and 96/float56 is common in DSP chains.

When the production produces unwanted ultrasonic noise, then that's not a sampling rate problem. It is instead a production problem.

And that's perfectly OK, too: The neat part about having too much data is that other end-users (like you and me) are free to throw it away as expeditiously as we choose to.

To that end: I, for one, welcome our 192kHz overlords. (And then I'll shove it through my hardware DSP that operates at 24-bit 48kHz and fuhgettaboutit.)

I don't LISTEN to music in 192kHz. I listen in 48kHz like everyone else and it sounds perfectly fine. But, I do MIX my music in 192kHz, however, before it's final export to 48kHz. It is about the anti-aliasing principle I described in my post above. But, while I'm mixing my audio clock is at 192kHz, and I can't escape that. Hence I will be looking at how to run this project on a beefier device that could run at 192kHz sample rate.

If he could set it to 384kHz, he would.

Because of stairsteps he can hear or something.

Why stop there? HDMI supports 1536kHz audio -- plenty to capture WLW's AM broadcast at 700KHz alongside the entire spectrum below it. :)

But even here in these comments, they're not arguing that 192kHz is insufficient. I haven't seen anyone ever make that argument, actually, so from my perspective this sampling rate represents a useful amount of overkill.

The extra data is a very small price to pay for silence.

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