Schiit Happened, 2015 Chapter 4: Bridging the Gap

What we DO know is that our ears no not work anyway like how we represent audio in PCM form. We know that they are highly sensitive in some frequency ranges, and that sensitivity includes higher temporal impulse precision than is required, such as the 300-3khz band used for human speech.

As in, for some frequency bands, our "sampling rate" (if such a thing could be applied apples to apples in human hearing) is higher than in others. I suspect this may be related to our ability to localize 3D perfectly sound with only two ears.

Not only that, but also in some frequency bands, we can detect finer differences in sound level than 16 bit can describe.

So no, 16 bit/44.1khz probably is not sufficient.

Also, you bring up lossy encoding which has no place in this discussion. If you want to discuss how lossy codecs exploit the flaws in hearing to compress audio better, talk about codecs that use wavelets and are highly effective at what they do due to a finely tuned psychoacoustic model, such as exploiting that our "sampling rate" and "bit depth" are non-linear across frequency bands.

Per Nyquist's Theorem, 44.1 kHz can represent frequencies up to 22050 Hz, which is higher than human hearing's estimated bandwith of 20 Hz - 20 kHz, and for most adults isn't much higher than 17 kHz.

However, take the extreme case of a 22 kHz sine wave, it will be represented in PCM as a triangle wave! So, with 44.1 kHz, the closer you get to 22 kHz, the more distortion / harmonics you get, which may be noticeable.

In the textbook case, more than 16 bits per sample might just seem to lower the noise floor. However this is based on the assumption that the voltage spacing is exactly the same for every increment in the sample word -- and this is simply not going to be true in the real world.

This applies to both axes: at 44.1kHz, no clock tick is going to be precisely equally spaced from every other.

In other words, every A/D and D/A process is introducing non-linear behaviour and thus artefacts that change according to the actual input, as a concern quite outside that of the noise floor or the Nyquist limit.

Increasing the bit depth and sample rate helps reduce the effects of such non-linearities.

Now scale power 1000x, I bet price will go up as well. Probably exponentially.

    > HiFi seems pretty rotten to me.

(Example: Audioquest, maker of $1,000+ audio cables, also makes a very solid little USB amp&DAC called the Dragonfly that costs just over $100. I'm not suggesting that they're selling these at a loss or anything, but I'm sure that product lines like $1,000+ audio cables give them some freedom to try products like the Dragonfly...)