Mike Sargent wrote: > It may be better quality than CD, but odds are that you can't hear the > difference. No one can. CD was designed to exceed the limits of human > hearing and in the last 40 years we haven't evolved bat-like hearing > (despite what people desperate to sell you the same music again say). > > Test yourself and you will find that CD resolution is all you need. > > Mike
I mostly share your attitude, and I agree that most of us find CD resolution all we need. But I must disagree with the notion that the CD format "was designed to exceed the limits of human hearing" in any absolute sense. Like most things, it was a compromise, in this case a compromise between some semblance of audio perfection and storage capacity. Squeezing 600 MB onto a single, mass-producible disc was quite a feat in 1982. (There was a story that the capacity was dictated by the wife of Sony's president, who insisted that Beethoven's Symphony #9 had to fit on one disc.) Like most new technologies that seem at first to be perfect, because they are free of the obvious problems of past technologies, it took some time for people to learn to hear the imperfections of the CD format. Many -- probably most -- of us have never learned, and we are usually happier for our ignorance. But I don't think it's at all reasonable to think that, because I usually hear no difference between 16 and 24 bits, or between 44.1 and 96 KHz sample rates (with ears that are old enough that they hear little or nothing above 10 KHz), therefore anybody who claims to hear a difference must be wrong. LMS (recent) running on Debian X86_64; 5 Squeezelite players (3 in PiCorePlayer), 3 players connected via Airplay Bridge 1 Squeezebox Radio (upgraded UE Smart Radio) now mostly retired ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RobbH's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=67008 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=111693 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
