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RE: Frequencie$



I'm coming to this rather late, having not had the disposable time to
keep up with the digests the last couple of days.
but I have posted on this before, & some of you may remember.....

this isn't a digital vs analog(ue) debate- I can go on about that for
days, & repeat my theories of audio fingerprinting & spectral responses
& so on.

no, this is about the highest frequency that humans can perceive. 

I knew I had it somewhere, & I found it again just three days ago- an
article from a 1993 issue of audio-media, in which no less an
"authority" than rupert neve himself describes, anecdotally, some blind
tests he performed. 
he was prompted to do this after discovering that no less a person than
geoff emerick had detected a fault on several neve-built mixing-desk
channels, of which the only symptom was a 3dB lift at 30kHz. 
this was either at AIR or at abbey road, I forget.

what neve did was to play sine & square to his listeners, at 9kHz & up,
& have them tell him if they could hear a difference between the two
sounds. I can scan the article if anyone wants to get into it more than
that. but so- can they hear the first partial at 27kHz? 
he reckons some of them did.

for one, I remain sceptical. (skeptikal?). 

there's no way (at least not from this article) to eliminate
shortcomings in the test environment or equipment. I can do the same
test at home & still not be sure that what I'm hearing is 27kHz & not
some phantom sideband. should I use headphones or a speaker? how good is
my amp? is something resonating in the room or the headset & producing
an undertone? 

but here's the thing: 
I know (as an engineer working amongst bean-counters) that the guys at
phillips & sony went with 44.1/16 for as many reasons of economy as of
science &/or musical fidelity, & based on the unwritten understanding
that most people can't really hear much above 15kHz on a good day, that
most meaningful audio contains little of interest out beyond 18kHz, &
that what is out there isn't worth worrying what shape waveform it is. 

we're talking percentages here, the same ones that have since brought us
atrac & MP3.
 
the big noise at sony back then (norio ohga) was adamant that the
sony/phillips engineers fit 63 minutes of 16-bit audio onto the damn
discs so he could listen to an unexpurgated (& recorded by his mate
karajan) rendering of famous beethoven's famous ninth symphony. 
(name the movie? but I digress....), 
& the limits of the technology /then available/ dictated the rest. 

[source- "sony- the private life", john nathan, harper-collins-business,
1999]

in fact the technical challenge of recording digital audio goes back a
good deal further than that, to the earliest attempts using PCM &
professional VCR machines. it ought to be intuitively obvious to anyone
of a mildly technical bent that, faced with such a challenge, the
engineers are going to do the very least they can get away with in order
to make the damn thing work reliably. in 1975, this was 44.1k sampling
at 16-bit.
now that the buggers want to sell us the technology all over again, &
the task is made easier with custom VLSI & cheap storage, we are told
that only 192/24 is really good enough. 

those of us lucky enough to have our own studer analogue tape decks at
home knew this all along, of course. :-)

duncan.



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