"The Beginner’s Guide to Hi-Res Audio"

You should read the methodology in detail. The test samples auditioned by several hundred individuals compared the full resolution originals with RedBook equivalents. The conclusion speaks for itself: “Hi-Res Audio or HD-Audio provides no perceptible fidelity improvement over a standard-resolution CD or file. “

The author of that study originally set up a recording label specifically for the production of high-resolution audio, from recording to delivery. He of all people would surely have wished that Hi Res was detectable. According to his findings it wasn’t.

But is it necessary to render an improvement, audible in a controlled blind listening test, to a 2 channel music recording? 

If you are refering to my last statement about the audible difference between currently available HD and UltraHD tracks, that is more a conclusion, based on those fundamentals of digital signal porcessing which I tried to briefly summarize before, rather than a claim.

How about the claim that “digital audio with increased sampling rates of 96kHz or even 192kHz would indeed provide a very noticeable benefit as it allows for more precise positioning and depth of the sound sources.”

Your "fundamentals of digital signal processing" are gibberish.  You made some claims that are not backed up by any mathematical or practical evidence.  All evidence points to there being no benefit of either 24 bits or sample rates over 48 kHz in the playback of digital audio.

You’ve clearly done enough research on the topic to know that what you’ve stated is far from accepted fact. You had to know that if you post a theory like this on a forum with others knowledgeable on the subject, it’s not going to be blindly accepted.

Shame on me :)

I basically agree with the statement above. And while it is fairly obvious (at least to me) that there is no audible benefit by increasing the bit/sample resolution form 16 to 24, I don’t think there is a similar conclsuion on the increase in sampling rate, yet. For 2D stereo recordings and stationary sound sources there are some studies out there suggesting that there is no audible benefit from increasing the sampling rate above 48kHz. This is where we might just stop the discussion with a simple 16bit/44.1kHz is good enough, period.

OTOH the psychoacoustic propeties around the detection of minimum audible angle and depth of a sound source from low to high frequencies are still very much under investiagtion and not entirely understood. All I was stating is, that when the CD was developed the focus was primarily on accurate reconstruction of the amplitude spectrum while the phase spectrum was of lower importance.  

CIte for the following definitive statement in your original post, please:

While it's true that the human ear (and brain) cannot hear the amplitude of frequencies above, say, 18kHz our two ears can extremely well detect phase differences between frequencies that are much higher! So while we cannot hear those frequencies as tones, we can detect the tiny differences in runtime which it takes those inaudible frequencies to arrive at the left and right ear respectively. In other words, our spatial location capabilities are of much higher resolution than our frequency hearing capabilities. Btw, this effect is heavily used by 3D sound systems like Dolby Atmos or THX.

Because in your above quoted post, you seem to say the claim is “still very much under investiagtion (sic) and not entirely understood.”  So which is it, a definitive fact or something to be investigated?

BTW, THX is a quality standard, not a codec like Atmos or DTS.

Ahh, I see, good catch!

I think most audio and dsp engineers would agree with my statment that 44.1kHz is not enough to fully capture the audible relevant phase properties of a complex music source, such as an orchestra in a concert hall. There are complex dynamic patterns of phase variants and thus interaural phase differences created by musicians moving their instruments as they perfrom which are lost in a signal sampled at 44.1kHz. This I would call an accepted fact.

In a first but not necessarly sufficient step one could increase the sampling rate to capture more of this information. However, psychoaccoustic experiments indicate, for example, the perception of the phase to be non-linear across the spectrum. Also these effects seem to be time-variant and dependent on the source. So increasing the resolution of the phase evenly across the spectrum by increasing the sampling frequency alone might not be sufficient to deliver the desired result. This is something to be investigated.

Please cite where this is proven as “accepted fact”.  Just stating it does not make it so.  Quite frankly, I’ve been around this stuff for a long time and I’ve never heard an inkling about these supposed phase differences being lost at 44.1 kHz.  

So your definitive statements in your first post were mere bluster, thinking we’d accept your post at face value?  Sorry, this ain’t the forum for that type of BS.