AW: AW: OT: new Macbook wíthOUT Firewire :(

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

> Not wanting to start a discussion about sample rate, but..
> Again, on rec.audio.pro, it was mostly agreed that sample rates above
> 44.1 or 48 doesn't yield anything, other than you her the 
> drive more ;) I'll look for a link to that discussion..

Well, you just started it ;)

Without wanting to go into too much detail here, I'd like to point out a 
few
items regarding sample rates here:

As you (most probably) all know, the human ear can only hear up to about
16kHz (depending a lot on age and possible abuse), with some people able to
hear up to about 20kHz (and I don't want to discuss precise values here, so
if these values are in your opinion not correct, this will not affect the
text about to follow...).
However, these values rely to stimuli with sine waves. Other experiments
however lead to the conclusions that:
        1. the human ear can hear and discern properties in transients 
which
correspond to fourier transforms of above 20kHz
        2. the human ear can detect phase relationships on a scale smaller
than 1/20kHz in the time domain

What do we need this for? (1) is used a lot for defining the 
characteristics
of the sound. (2) is vitally important in directional hearing.

Furthermore, we got the issue with the anti-aliasing filters, which due to
their nature are NOT brickwalls at the Nyquist frequency (in case of a CD
22.05kHz).

So taking all of that into consideration, I can see (not that I actually 
did
listening tests here) that it may very well be possible that there is an
advantage of 96kHz over 48kHz - other than loading my computer.

        Rainer