High Playback Sampling Frequencies, Why are they becoming popular? Options

[icstm]

OK, at the risk of sounding completely stupid?

Why do people listen to music with high sampling frequencies?
What is 88k+ providing them?
I understand why you might record at a high sampling rate, but why keep that for playback?

Looking through the FAQ, there are threads from 2003 that point out that the sampling frequency and bit-dept work in tandem. So the quantisation error of 16bit at 44.1k has the opportunity to be corrected sooner at a higher sampling rate, so in some ways is like a dithering pattern.

However given noise introduced in the analogue systems required to listen to music, a SNR within a 16bit signal of ~96dB seems pretty good.

So assuming that speakers struggle to produce the sounds that a 192k sampling frequency allow (eg 96kHz) and assuming that 16bits were sufficient when compared to the analogue equipment in the system, what have I missed in these high sampling playback formats?

[zaentzpantz]

OK, at the risk of sounding completely stupid?

Why do people listen to music with high sampling frequencies?
What is 88k+ providing them?
I understand why you might record at a high sampling rate, but why keep that for playback?

Looking through the FAQ, there are threads from 2003 that point out that the sampling frequency and bit-dept work in tandem. So the quantisation error of 16bit at 44.1k has the opportunity to be corrected sooner at a higher sampling rate, so in some ways is like a dithering pattern.

However given noise introduced in the analogue systems required to listen to music, a SNR within a 16bit signal of ~96dB seems pretty good.

So assuming that speakers struggle to produce the sounds that a 192k sampling frequency allow (eg 96kHz) and assuming that 16bits were sufficient when compared to the analogue equipment in the system, what have I missed in these high sampling playback formats?

The main benefit of a higher sampling rate is that the anti-aliasing filtering can have a flatter roll-off. There is a school of thought that the harsh sound of cds is due to the brickwall filter at around 20kHz and the effects of it's phase/time aberrations. With 96kHz, the filter only needs to cut off by 48kHz so a gentle slope from 20kHz-48kHz is used with much less phase/time aberrations.
Another is the as yet unexplained effect of supersonic frequencies on the sound, discovered by engineers at George Martins' Air studios in the 70s. One channel module always sounded better than the others in the recording console, and after research by the designer (Rupert Neve) the only difference found was an omitted termination resisitor which allowed the frequency response to extend up to around 90kHz. When fitted it then sounded the same as the other modules and the frequency response was reduced to around 40kHz. Nobody has found out why this could be heard, but the people involved were sufficiently respected to be believed and has given birth to the odd practise of extending audio response beyond our hearing limits.

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

The main benefit of a higher sampling rate is that the anti-aliasing filtering can have a flatter roll-off. There is a school of thought that the harsh sound of cds is due to the brickwall filter at around 20kHz and the effects of it's phase/time aberrations.

AFAIK that so-called school of thought was actually a school of non-thought and non-observation. It has been conclusively shown repeatedly that the alleged harsh sound of PCs were unrelated to the reb book CD's technical parameters or even the portions of the implementation of it that were unique to the CD.

The biggest problem with the CD was that it was such a big technical improvement that it generally made things sound different by actually removing a bunch of technological veils that just about everybody with a serious interest in audio technology knew full well about.

From a practical viewpoint, the introduction of the CD was the most successful advance in media technology until the introduction of the DVD.