So I’ve listened to all the arguments from people who don’t understand the Nyquist theorem for why audio higher than 44khz doesn’t actually matter and you can’t hear it bla bla bla. From literal decades of personal experience of hearing the difference from the production side and knowing that from a physics perspective that it’s just not true, I present objective evidence that you can hear frequencies above 20khz.

First: a sample of a track I’m currently mixing/mastering

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WvSAkDAlV4g0joqmlgJcVSDKrLBq3bkO/view?usp=sharing

Second: the same exact sample at the same exact volume with a 22khz tone applied.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LK6n5zd6QsrzcfW9n967NPsAzp2BRaA8/view?usp=sharing

If you can hear the difference (spoiler alert: you can), then you objectively can hear frequencies above 20hkz and by extension you must necessarily concede that there is a point to having waveforms capable of representing higher frequencies.

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  • audioen@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I couldn’t hear any difference personally. Granted, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on either sample, but to me they sounded exactly the same.

    My system only has 48 kHz digital audio link from an external soundcard to the Genelec speakers that I use, and it is possible that a 22 kHz signal would already be largely filtered out in the playback chain because it is above 20 kHz and if a sample rate conversion to 48 kHz is needed, some low-pass filtering will be applied.

    Testing stuff like this would take some care to ensure that the test is even valid – I’d need to use a microphone to make sure that any ultrasonic sound is even there.