Comment by Derbasti
14 years ago
> 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.