Comment by barrkel
14 years ago
The ears distinguish directional audio in part from timing differences in what hits each ear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization cites http://web.archive.org/web/20100410235208/http://www.cs.ucc.... that suggests the brain is sensitive to timing differences between ears as low as 10 microseconds, or 0.01ms.
It's not the timing differences, it's the phase differences. The ear is exceptionally sensitive to phase differences between the ears below 1kHz. This information is captured exactly (to well beyond the naive precision of the sampling clock) for any frequency below Nyquist.