Focus on 24/192 Misguided?.....

The article seems right, as far as the author goes. He admits to the problem of brick wall filters on Redbook CD, but he forgets to mention timing errors. This is why a cirrectly clocked computer regenerated waveform seems to improve on the CD, thru the same DAC. I would propose a much reduced timing error as part of the improvement of the higher res sampling frequenies. There is also a lot of talk on WAV beng better than FLAC (even though "bits are bits").
Stretching, I would hypothesize that the regeneration of the waveform by the additional complication of the FLAC decompression "bothers" our sensibilities in some way. IF so, then I would also propose that the decompression of MLP on a DVD-A might be similar.
My hypothetical ranking of sound which seems to agree with what I hear is:
CD<=FLAC<=WAV (for 16/44.1)<=24/96MLP<=24/96PCM<=24/192MLP (for DVD/A <= DSD, and just for fun <= LP. At some points the minor improvements may not be worth the additional storage requirements.
Remember, just speculating!

Trust your ears and decide. What I have in 24/96 or 24/192 blows away the 16/44.1 versions most of the time. It's all about the mastering.

All this talk about tests and links to this study and all this technical stuff....

REALITY: All that means nothing when you have people that like and dislike things based on their own opinion of what "sounds good". Many feel tubes sound better than SS.... HOW CAN YOU TEST THAT? YOU CANNOT. The listener has their opinion of what sounds good. So posting links to these different things is POINTLESS.

I found this nice article called "A Beginner’s Guide to High Resolution Downloads of Music". here is the link:
http://audaud.com/2012/03/a-beginners-guide-to-high-resolution-downloads-of-music/

In this article is a para called "How hi-res should you go?" towards the bottom (scroll almost to the end). That para cut & paste:
'Unless you have extremely youthful hearing ability plus the highest-end speakers and audio gear, many of us feel that the improvement of 192K over 96K is inaudible. The word length expansion from 16 bits to 24 bits makes a much greater enhancement in the sound. 24/96 or 24/88.2 is fine for nearly everything. Also, remember that 192K and 176.4K files take up much more memory on hard drives, for little audible improvement.'

Looks like many people think alike: there's a case for 88.2K or 96K sampling but not beyond......

04-20-12: Bombaywalla
Al, Kijanki: I *think* that I might know what the author is intending to say here: To do an A/B comparison, the author would like to level the playing field.... Does this make sense guys?

Hi Bombaywalla,

I think that what he is referring to in note 21 and in the "Clipping" paragraph is a comparison between a 192 kHz hi rez signal, and that same signal downsampled to 44.1 or 48 kHz and then upsampled back to 192 kHz. Both 192 kHz signals would be played back through the same DAC and the same downstream components. If they were to sound different in any way it would presumably mean that the lower sample rate, and/or the downsampling and upsampling processes, degraded the signal. Which signal sounds subjectively better would be irrelevant.

As I indicated earlier, though, it seems to me that the flaw in that methodology is that it does not take into account the sonic effects of the anti-alias and reconstruction filters that would be used if the recording and playback processes were done at the lower sample rate.

Best regards,
-- Al