Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

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So far, the highest frequency that we've been able to determine that humans can process is about 28khz. That's about 1/3rd of an octave above what the limits of CD and most streaming services provide.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans

"Old-fashioned" CD, when mastered with modern noise shaping, gets super-close to the fundamental limits of human hearing. Furthermore, as the above link points out, older people often can't hear above 15khz. Thus, if you're older, you might not be capable of hearing the difference between a CD and the same mix on BluRay or DVD.

FWIW: There's a lot of psuedoscience in the audiophile market. Things like DSD and sampling rates about 96khz make little sense outside of the recording studio. (This is because the absolute upper limit of human hearing is 28khz. 96khz exceeds the human hearing range by almost an octave.)

You're confusing frequency and resolution. Just because a set of music fits in a certain frequency range doesn't mean that all representations of it are equal. For example, consider this in graphical form:

https://i.imgur.com/ZgU1bgI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZpbyyI.jpg

Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.

The sampling rate and frequency range are tied together though. The Nyquist rate says the sampling rate must be 2x the bandwidth. If you sample at 96KHz, the most bandwidth you'd get is sound waves up to 48KHz and still be able to accurately reproduce them. However, if human hearing taps out at 28KHz, then you could sample up to 56KHz and still reliably reproduce the same sound.

At that point, the only real advantage to 96khz is that it pushes any potential distortion out of the audible range.

But going above 96khz or DSD is silly outside of the recording studio.

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