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Comment by move-on-by

4 days ago

I don’t have great hearing, so I’m not sure I can really weigh in here (thanks punk concerts in my teens). I remember similar arguments around screens and 60Hz vs ‘the human eye’. I think a lot of people, myself included, can easily perceive the difference between 60Hz and something higher- given the right conditions. I would not be so quick to disregard claims of more sensitive hearing.

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move-on-by

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speak_on  4 days ago

(I commented on this topic above/below in more detail.) Even with not-so-great hearing you would still be able to identify the difference (ie artifacts are pushed down, not up). Look up articles on the practical limitations of AD/DA converters and why the seemingly counter-intuitive claim that the difference between 44.1 kHz and above is noticeable, is actually a fully industry-accepted practical reality: aliasing, AD/DA lowpass filters, etc.

labcomputer  4 days ago

I would. It’s really simple.

The human threshold-of-hearing curve intersects the threshold-of-pain curve at about 20 kHz.

Above that frequency (or thereabouts) the sound has to be so loud that it will literally instantly damage your hearing before you can hear it.

This has been replicated across many studies for more than 100 years.

Flicker threshold is completely different. You can’t damage your vision by increasing the FPS, and it has always been commercially desirable to use a lower frequency because that is cheaper.

  • speak_on  4 days ago

    Would you agree that a trained human could identify artifacts produced by an imperect conversion process? If you lean "yes", then that's your answer: AD/DA is not a Rust function perfectly implementing the Nyquist theorem, it's a collection of physical components many of which introduce artifacts into the audio path. This thread is not about the theory of human hearing, the electronic components are literally imperfect.

    • PaulDavisThe1st  4 days ago

      They're no more imperfect than the pickups on an electric guitar, the assembly inside the microphone, the circuit in the compressor and everything else in the analog signal chain that exists long before AD happens.

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