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.
You must log in or register to comment.
You cannot hear frequencies outside the audible range. You wrote that you can; the statement is wrong. Objective proof that you could, would require a blind test. Further, detecting a difference between two samples is not the same thing as detecting frequencies beyond the audible range. If you can detect a difference, but can’t discern which sample contains the high frequency tone, then you are not detecting the tone at all. This is why you need a blind test.
I have nothing to add regarding any effects a high frequency tone has on sound in the audible range or whether or not it matters, but your “objective proof” of “detecting” high frequency tones is misleading at best, and I don’t even think it’s the point you’re trying to make.
When you say one thing that is objectively wrong, it takes away from anything else you’re saying that is possibly correct or at the very least worth discussing.
It’s not a difference between two samples…that’s not how this works.
When you say one thing that is objectively wrong, it takes away from anything else you’re saying that is possibly correct or at the very least worth discussing
Enlighten me then
It’s literally the exact opposite. you’re hearing the result of *additive* interference. The samples are literally being added together which gives the result that I provided.
Yeah, but what you’re hearing is the effect of the high frequency tone on the sound waves in the audible range, you’re not hearing the high frequency tone itself (as it isn’t in the audible range). Just because you can hear a difference, doesn’t mean that you could ever blindly identify (detect) that the tone was there.
In any case, my point is that your post is poorly worded and it’s evident in all the replies of, “you’re just proving my point for me”. What you said and what you’re trying to convey are not aligned. The outcome is people telling you you’re wrong when you see it as them actually agreeing with you.
What I see is that this community does not follow the very first rule of the community which is “1. Be most excellent towards the community
And by “be most excellent” we mean no insults, derogatory remarks, personal attacks, threats, bullying, trolling, baiting, flaming, hate speech, racism, sexism, gatekeeping, or other behavior that makes humanity look like scum”Everyone in the community would rather try to belittle me and nitpick at interpretation of my post when obviously you all understand exactly what I attempted to convey. But rather than just starting from there when clearly the entire community knew exactly what was happening (which is what I was illustrating) they would rather be pompous and arrogant.
The fact of the matter is that hearing the *effect* of the high frequency is semantically synonymous with broadly hearing the high frequency. I didn’t say that I can hear a pure 22khz tone on its own which would be much more semantically narrow than what I said. You chose an interpretation and chose to be rude based on that interpretation.
Don’t know why we’re bothering talking about IMD when the track is clipped. Of course you’ll hear things.
I feel like this is one of those thoughts that are so stupid that the general reddit cant find the gap in reasoning
Read up on intermodulation distortion. Real systems are not completely linear. Superimposing a high amplitude supersonic frequency on music can indeed cause audible effects. But they are not an improvement.
This is where the conversation should start honestly. Why are they not an improvement? From an audio editing perspective those frequencies above 22khz contain a lot of information which can be useful for a number of things (FFT/DFT/STFT/AI/etc.). Modern synthesizers create frequencies in that range and many studio rats (myself included) will tell you that there are sounds which are better when preserving those high frequencies at 96khz
When frequencies mix in a nonlinear system, sum and difference frequencies are created. When supersonic frequencies are involved, the difference frequencies can dip down well into the audible range, and because they are not harmonically related to the actual musical signal, they sound awful.
In a theoretically perfect system, you could have ultra wide bandwidth recordings without this problem. While few people can actually hear anything above 20KHz (By the time we reach adulthood, most people can only hear sounds up to 15-17 kHZ.), at least there would be no intermodulation distortion products to degrade the music below 20KHz.
I feel like we’re saying the same thing with different words
people who don’t understand the Nyquist theorem
Not to mention the ones who don’t understand IMD
Thanks for making my point for me.
All you are demonstrating is intermodulation distortion… This is not what you think it is…
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.
Hey if op wants to produce music this way more power to him :D
I guess that will make for a nice plugin
can u post your abx so i can decide whether downloading this is even worth it? :)
This is exactly the kind of pontificating that makes so many audiophiles insufferable
Just learned a new word
Since when do higher sample rates not matter? The anti aliasing filter in 44.1 alone will degrade the sound.
Lookup the wiki on trigonometric identities and see what happens when 2 sine waves get multiplied together. What you get is called modulation products. For example, if you have 2 sine waves at different frequencies - say 95 kHz and 96 kHz - and you multiply them together, you get 2 totally different frequencies as the outcome. One will be the sum of the two input frequencies or 191 kHz - I’ll go out on a limb and posit that none of us mere mortals would be able to hear that. The other frequency would be the difference between the two input frequencies or 1 kHz - which at least most of us can hear.
So, OP, is it possible that whatever Jedi mind trick you are doing with 96 kHz is leading to a modulation product that lands within the audible range?
Hang on, are you sure youre not confusing this with sample rates? You absolutely cannot hear 44khz frequencies, but you can record at higher sample rates and, arguably, hear a difference in the amount of information being recorded (thats debatable, but much more realistic than hearing a frequency at 44khz or 96khz).
In the pc gaming world you’ll find plenty of people who sincerely believe that they have superhuman powers.
They believe they can see very high framerates. They believe that that very low latencys are discernable.
They believe that they can see ray tracings when running around and driving at high speed
Etc etc.
Try pointing out the limits of human perception and they think you’re insane.
No matter how much humans want to believe they have super human power. They don’t have them.
Many things are completely beyond the human limits of perception.
They always have been and they always will be.
The one thing that humans have in abundance though is the ability to delude themselves.
“The one thing that humans have in abundance though is the ability to delude themselves.”
Agreed, and at one point in time Galileo was jailed for saying the Earth was round.
Quality bait. Even with an experiment. Very unusual.