Seems I've started something I tried to avoid - a public argument about the advisability of higher resolution audio formats. For posterity, why I think it's a good idea for ALSA to support higher resolution audio formats on hardware that provides the necessary capabilities:
According to this paper, authored by Joshua Reiss and published by the Audio Engineering Society http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296 which describes a meta-analysis of 18 previously published experiments involving more than 10,000 trials: Results showed a small but statistically significant ability of test > subjects to discriminate high resolution content, and this effect increased > dramatically when test subjects received extensive training. > According to me - no kind of expert on anything whatsoever - there is a lot of music being distributed in high resolution format, whether remastered from analogue or recorded in high resolution content in the first place. Why would a person buying this want to downsample it? This takes time, can require, in my experience anyway, experimenting with the level to eliminate clipping introduced by the resampling, and perhaps introduce other undesirable artifacts, depending on the kind of filtering that the downsampling process uses? -- Chris Hermansen · clhermansen "at" gmail "dot" com C'est ma façon de parler.
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