"Having studied Auditory ..."
Nov 3, 2009 21:57:38 GMT
Post by Deleted on Nov 3, 2009 21:57:38 GMT
The attached post may be of interest to some of the older members, who may believe that just because they have severe HF rolloff with their hearing due to age, that higher resolution playback is pointless.
Alex
Having studied auditory
Having studied auditory neurobiology extensively and being an electronics engineer, I'm in no doubt that the shift to 24-bit/192kHz is beneficial, not so much because you're going to notice a huge difference in sound quality like the transition from LP to CD, but mainly because it should result in a clearer perception of spatial positioning within a recording. ie. The finer details should be improved.
Early stages of the auditory system have amazing temporal resolution; a figure of 10us was mentioned in one paper. This results in the ear processing 100kHz signals! So I believe that 192kHz is actually about right. The neurons can phase lock precisely to the incoming stimulus up to a maximum frequency of around 5kHz. This phase locking ends abruptly when this information is translated into a place code or spatial map within the mid-brain.
So what I'm saying is that with such a huge bandwidth implied by 192kHz sampling, we don't actually care about hearing range per say, we are more concerned with temporal resolution at lower frequencies - up to 5kHz. This will enable you to accurately place sounds in your brains model of 3D space.
However, for this to work, the temporal accuracy of the recording is going to have to be utterly and faithfully preserved throughout the entire audio chain. A tall order I would say, especially at the loudspeaker end. But a careful headphone listener should in theory be able to notice the difference.
To the guy somewhere in this thread that said time dispertion would be a problem with two cascaded brickwall filters in modern sigma-delta DAC's, I don't think that's the case. These filters will be FIR types and have linear phase and therefore there won't be any time dispertion no matter how many you cascade. Just more delay
Cheers,
Mark.
www.computeraudiophile.com/content/24-bit192kHz-pointless?page=3
Alex
Having studied auditory
Having studied auditory neurobiology extensively and being an electronics engineer, I'm in no doubt that the shift to 24-bit/192kHz is beneficial, not so much because you're going to notice a huge difference in sound quality like the transition from LP to CD, but mainly because it should result in a clearer perception of spatial positioning within a recording. ie. The finer details should be improved.
Early stages of the auditory system have amazing temporal resolution; a figure of 10us was mentioned in one paper. This results in the ear processing 100kHz signals! So I believe that 192kHz is actually about right. The neurons can phase lock precisely to the incoming stimulus up to a maximum frequency of around 5kHz. This phase locking ends abruptly when this information is translated into a place code or spatial map within the mid-brain.
So what I'm saying is that with such a huge bandwidth implied by 192kHz sampling, we don't actually care about hearing range per say, we are more concerned with temporal resolution at lower frequencies - up to 5kHz. This will enable you to accurately place sounds in your brains model of 3D space.
However, for this to work, the temporal accuracy of the recording is going to have to be utterly and faithfully preserved throughout the entire audio chain. A tall order I would say, especially at the loudspeaker end. But a careful headphone listener should in theory be able to notice the difference.
To the guy somewhere in this thread that said time dispertion would be a problem with two cascaded brickwall filters in modern sigma-delta DAC's, I don't think that's the case. These filters will be FIR types and have linear phase and therefore there won't be any time dispertion no matter how many you cascade. Just more delay
Cheers,
Mark.
www.computeraudiophile.com/content/24-bit192kHz-pointless?page=3