44.1/16 vs 96/24

[renearts]

@Stephane

@davide256

The answer is that the human ear can hear things you aren’t aware of and with digital media there is a subliminal distortion irritant factor that creates listening fatigue. Higher resolution music reduces this fatigue so that you can listen longer without tiring. 44.1 khz/16 bit recordings can be excellent but as the mix of instruments and dynamic range between the instruments grows the digital irritants due to the lesser data rate standard grow. In actuality the single biggest improvement one can make is the jump from 16 bit to 24 bit data records in PCM… the sampling rate increase from 44.1 to 96khz is not as audible a difference vs the change from 16 bit to 24 bit depth.

Any scientific source of that?

There is enough scientific evidence that it is bullsh*t
Up until now there is no evidence of a human being able to hear frequencies over 20kHz, and the Nyquist/Shannon theorem still hasn’t been proven wrong. For recording/production environments it makes perfect sense to use higher bitrates and resolutions to have some margin for processing, but after the final mastering there is no need to use anything higher than 16bit/44.1kHz.

Some more reading material (with scientific backup!):
numeralnine.wordpress.com/2013/ … l-consumer