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

This is the way it was always going to turn out.  The conversation continues until you get caught in a trap.  There was never going to be another outcome.

What trap is that?  The poster contradicted their own earlier posts and I asked for an explanation.  Any trap the poster fell into was of their own making.

A small digression out of curiosity - why was an “odd” number- 44100 - selected in the first place? If 40000 needed a margin of safely, why not 48000? Or even 44000?

Several reasons.  It was the Sony standard for PCM, it's a product of prime numbers (2*2*3*3*5*5*7*7), which makes calculations easier,, and one of the things the CD consortium insisted on was Beethoven's 9th Symphony would fit on one disc (but this was more related to the debate on the size of the disk).

Who would have thought that?! Interesting.

Yeah, internet formus seem to attract those flat-earthers who use negative results to prove the non-existence of any given phenomenon.  I don’t really bother especially if the most compelling counter argument they present is that they have never heard about it garnished with a hint on the many yeears of experience they have under their belt.

But for arguments sake, you may want to read J. Robert Stuarts’s paper on “Coding for High-Resolution Audio Systems”, published 2004 in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Everything I have stated about sampling rate and high frequency content you can more or less find in Chapter 5 of this paper, and in particular section 5.1 Psychoacoustic Data to Support Higher Sampling Rates:”...It has been suggested that perhaps higher sampling rates are preferred because, somehow, the human hearing system will resolve small time differences which might imply a wider bandwidth in a linear system. In considering this it is important to distinguish between perceiving separate events which are very close together in time (implying wide bandwidth and fine monaural temporal resolution) and those events which help build the auditory scene, for which the relative arrival times are either binaural or well separated. In the first case, wider bandwidth is required to discriminate acoustic events that are closer together in time. This seems to be an alternative statement of the problem to determine the maximum bandwidth necessary for audible transparency...Events in time can be dis- criminated to within very fine limits, and with a resolution very substantially smaller than the sampling period. This point is crucial because provided we treat all channels identically to ensure no skew of directional information, there is no direct relationship between the attainable tem- poral resolution and the sampling interval.“

So independet of whether you follow the author’s hyphotheses and findings or not, it is a well known paper from an AES Fellow, so you cannot really say that you never heard about this stuff.  

Following this paper in 2007 there has been an article from Meyer and Moran, also published in the AES Journal, whith the objective to find out if there are any audible gains from high-res audio playback by doing some extensive, formalized testing. Their conclusion was that based on their test methodology they could not find any significant preference for hi-res audio over the CD standard, even when using high-end headphones or speaker systems. However, they very correctly noted that “it is very difficult to use negative results to prove the inaudibility of any given phenomenon or process”. The most intriguing part of this arcticle, however, was their final note on high-resolution recordings: “Though our tests failed to substantiate the calimed advantages of high-resolution encoding for two-channel audio, one trend became obvious...throughout our testing: virtually all of the SACD and DVD-A recdoings sounded better than most CD’s - sometimes much better...Partly because[...]engineers and producers are give the freedom to produce recodings that sound as good as they can make them, without having to compress or equalize the signal to suit lesser systems.”

And here we go. I truly belive there are advances to be made in capturing and reproducing more accurately what our ears actually perceive in a concert hall. I am a big fan of innovation. And the proliferation of Hi-Res audio formats as we are witnessing right now is certainly one way to inspire more innovation to come forward in this field. Even if we are not (yet) experiencing it in the UltraHD tracks we get to listen to today.

How does one resolve the internal contradiction in the quoted except by attributing the “sounded better” thing to better mastering, which is said in the quote to be partly the reason for the better sound; and no one here disputes that better mastering can deliver audibly better sound. But, if that is partly the reason, what is rest of it? That is left hanging in the air...and where mastering is the same and sound levels are accurately matched, these differences have not survived in any published blind test, where the better master is downsampled to CD format and compared against the original version.

We can of course wait for the black swan, but I for one am not holding my breath.

To repeat also: all this applies only to 2 channel audio, where all the information needed to the extent audible, is captured by the bit rate and sampling frequency of the CD format.

To take this even further, very few can reliably hear the difference between even the CD format and lossy 320k, or the 256k that is how Apple lossy is coded. The head of Apple Music is on record as saying that he/his team cannot pick between Apple lossless and Apple lossy for 2 channel audio, except perhaps on very high quality headphones. In that case, can Hi Res offer more?

Apple Spatial Audio, or Dolby Atmos are an audibly different species no doubt and the information content needed to deliver them is a different matter.

This has been done to death all over the internet. However I’d make a few observations:

• Bob Stuart is an originator of MQA, a ‘hi res’ format which has divided the industry. In part this is due to its lossy nature, in part because it’s a form of DRM extracting licence fees along the chain. 
• The Meyer and Moran study has come in for criticism. An argument was that some of their ‘hi res’ content may not have actually had guaranteed high resolution provenance. 
• The only large scale study, to my knowledge, is the one by Mark Waldrep referenced earlier. He too found fault with Meyer and Moran and, as an expert in high resolution recordings, took great care over the preparation of his test materials. By the sound of things @edchristoph has not delved into the full detail of this test which, as noted, concluded that ‘hi res’ added no perceptible fidelity improvement over Red Book.

The idea that there could be ‘something out there’ (unknown unknowns?) which Red Book fails to capture is a formula that’s been used down the ages by less than scrupulous salesmen to convince people to part with their money. Personally I’m not buying it. 

All of which just sums up to a scalar amplitude measured at each microphone, varying over time. This signal is fully and perfectly captured for all human audible frequencies (and beyond) by sampling at 44.1kHz.