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Re: AW: AW: OT: new Macbook wíthOUT Firewire :(



Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill wrote:
>>Not wanting to start a discussion about sample rate, but..
>>Again, on rec.audio.pro, it was mostly agreed that sample rates above
>>44.1 or 48 doesn't yield anything, other than you her the 
>>drive more ;) I'll look for a link to that discussion..
> 
> 
> Well, you just started it ;)
> 
> Without wanting to go into too much detail here, I'd like to point out a 
>few
> items regarding sample rates here:
> 
> As you (most probably) all know, the human ear can only hear up to about
> 16kHz (depending a lot on age and possible abuse), with some people able 
>to
> hear up to about 20kHz (and I don't want to discuss precise values here, 
>so
> if these values are in your opinion not correct, this will not affect the
> text about to follow...).
> However, these values rely to stimuli with sine waves. Other experiments
> however lead to the conclusions that:
>       1. the human ear can hear and discern properties in transients 
>which
> correspond to fourier transforms of above 20kHz
>       2. the human ear can detect phase relationships on a scale smaller
> than 1/20kHz in the time domain
> 
> What do we need this for? (1) is used a lot for defining the 
>characteristics
> of the sound. (2) is vitally important in directional hearing.
> 
> Furthermore, we got the issue with the anti-aliasing filters, which due 
>to
> their nature are NOT brickwalls at the Nyquist frequency (in case of a CD
> 22.05kHz).
> 
> So taking all of that into consideration, I can see (not that I actually 
>did
> listening tests here) that it may very well be possible that there is an
> advantage of 96kHz over 48kHz - other than loading my computer.
> 
>       Rainer

This is common belief, often debated and not holding water.
That we under very ideal conditions might be able to detect freqs higher 
than 20Khz may be proven true, but AFAIK has never proven by experiments 
related to music, even not by blind tests on Golden Ear test subjects.
I don't have links to docs derived in tightly controlled labs proving 
claims in either direction, which is often the case in such discussions.
However, as most even halfways adults can hardly detect freqs above ~14 
Khz, I find it mostly irrelevant for practical music production, even 
when using near state of art equipment.

WRT the Shannon and Nyquist criteria, stating frequencies reproducable 
up to half the sampling rate, provided infinitely steep anti-aliasing 
filters are used, this used to be a big problem in older days when using 
analog  filters, but is not the case with todays 64x oversampling and 
digital filters.

I'm sure some will say 96 (or 192Khz) sounds much better, and wil not 
argue that.  However, it was mathematically proven on rec.audio.pro the 
difference is hardly there. Further, certain interfaces actually does 
sound better/cleaner/whatever at higher sample rates, which is simply 
due to inadequate electronics desighns.


Please note: I honestly didn't mean to start such a discussion, merely 
point out that if we assume 48Khz is enough, dealing with a more than 
decent numbers of track over firewire400 shouldn't be a problem.

-- 
rgds,
van Sinn