44.1 vs 88.2 ABX report at AES Options

[2Bdecided]

Here:

http://www.aes.org/events/128/papers/?ID=2252

P18-6 Sampling Rate Discrimination: 44.1 kHz vs. 88.2 kHz—Amandine Pras, Catherine Guastavino, McGill University - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
It is currently common practice for sound engineers to record digital music using high-resolution formats, and then down sample the files to 44.1 kHz for commercial release. This study aims at investigating whether listeners can perceive differences between musical files recorded at 44.1 kHz and 88.2 kHz with the same analog chain and type of AD-converter. Sixteen expert listeners were asked to compare 3 versions (44.1 kHz, 88.2 kHz, and the 88.2 kHz version down-sampled to 44.1 kHz) of 5 musical excerpts in a blind ABX task. Overall, participants were able to discriminate between files recorded at 88.2 kHz and their 44.1 kHz down-sampled version. Furthermore, for the orchestral excerpt, they were able to discriminate between files recorded at 88.2 kHz and files recorded at 44.1 kHz.
Convention Paper 8101

Was anyone at the presentation? Has anyone bought the paper?

Cheers,
David.

[Dologan]

Interesting. The fact that the discrimination was mostly limited to the downsampled version would seem to indicate that any audibility issues are with the downsampling procedure rather than the sampling rate itself. There is, however, the case of the orchestral music...

Searching for the paper I also found that the same authors have published a test comparing CD-quality vs MP3:

Subjective Evaluation of MP3 Compression for Different Musical Genres

Mp3 compression is commonly used to reduce the size of digital music files but introduces a number of potentially audible artifacts, especially at low bitrates. We investigated whether listeners prefer CD quality to mp3 files at various bitrates (96 kb/s to 320 kb/s), and whether this preference is affected by musical genre. Thirteen trained listeners completed an A/B comparison task judging CD quality and compressed files. Listeners significantly preferred CD quality to mp3 files up to 192 kb/s for all musical genres. In addition, we observed a significant effect of expertise (sound engineers vs. musicians) and musical genres (electric v.s acoustic music).

Again, frustratingly little information given about the details of the test...