Comment by ferongr
14 years ago
>Same goes for 16/24 bit, however, the difference between 16 and 24 bit is actually audible.
This [1] (widely accepted in the scientific audio community) study's conclusions disagree with your assertion.
>44100 is not a bad sampling rate, but it necessitates very sharp aliasing filters, which are audibly bad.
This is not the 1980s, hardware has progressed beyond that point. Modern (i.e. anything from 1995 onwards) DACs do not suffer from aliasing problems. Also see [1]
>That bit about intermodulation distortion is complete bogus. He talks about problems when resampling high-fs audio data.
I did not notice that in the article. It talks about IMD in the context of the analog chain and the transducers following the DAC, and it's possible that high frequencies can increase it.
> Modern (i.e. anything from 1995 onwards) DACs do not suffer from aliasing problems.
True, but they do so using (long, high-quality) high-cut filters. And these filters are pretty sharp, as they have to close within, say, 18-22.1 kHz. You can design them as linear-phase FIR filters with oversampling and all the good stuff, but physics dictates that sharp filters introduce distortion. A sharp filter like that is audible.
I'm not aware of any (blind) listening tests actually showing that a modern, high-quality DAC for 44 kHz audio introduces audible distortion compared to a similarly high-quality DAC for, say, 96 kHz audio, though. It's not theoretically impossible that the lowpass would introduce some sort of noticeable distortion, but I haven't run into substantiated evidence that it actually does.