Saving music from destruction: upsampling Options

[krabapple]

This article starts off well , with a relatively sane (for audiophile-speak) statement of what good upsampling can and cannot do:

http://www.pstracks.com/av/ham-fisted-upsampling/

but then we get to David Chesky on the defense against accusations that his HDtracks download service is doing 'ham fisted' or pointless upsampling:

David responds. “Why do we sell hi res files at 192/24 when there is no musical energy up at 96khz? Lets look at it like this. In the current state of digital technology we do not have A/D chipsets that work at 44.1/16 that do not have pre and post ringing. This ringing destroys the music in the audio band. Audiophile labels do not record at 192/24 to try to capture what many think is air up over 50K. They do this as to keep the nasty anti-aliasing digital A/D filters as far away from the audio band as they can. This insures less corruption down where the music is. The sound becomes much more analog and relaxed. Think of pre and post ringing like this. You are riding down a street in a Ferrari at 180 MPH over a cobblestone road and someone gives you a camera and ask you to take some photos out of the windows. All these little cobblestones will cause bumps and the camera will not be steady and you will loose the focus. This is what happens in current A/D conversion as well at 44.1/16. Doubling or quadrupling that rate helps smooth the analogous ride."

Emphasis mine.

See any listening test data in there anywhere?

Nah, me neither. Nor any reason why 192kHz versus , say, 96 or 88.2*. Just another inane analogy to sports cars and cameras.

It never ends, does it?


* (if I recall my Dan Lavry whitepapers correctly, the possible negative effects from pre- and post-ringing are taken care of at a SR of ~60kHz)

This post has been edited by krabapple: May 31 2011, 23:11