In article , "Tommi"
wrote:


I may well be suffering the myth, but my understanding is that it matters
whether you sample a sine wave 2 or 8 times. Tests have been made where
subjects had to determine which sound came first from their headphones.
The same signal was fed to both L and R channels, only the other one was
delayed by 5-15 _micro_seconds.
Some of the people were able to "localize" the sound source even when it
was delayed only by 5 microseconds. This implies that a sampling rate of
192kHz(which results in 5.2 microsecond's sample intervals), for example,
is not only pushing the nyquist rate to the ultrasonic range, but also
presents better channel separation on multichannel systems.
So, it doesn't necessarily matter if you sample a sine wave 2 or 8 times
on a mono system, but on a multichannel system higher sample rates result in
better localization.


You have to take it one step at a time and separate the issues. 2
samples is enough to reconstruct the wave plain and simple. Bob Stuart
and Tom Holman have talked about the possibility of better time axis
resolution as it pertains to differences between two or more channels,
not to be confused with time axis resolution meaning a more detailed
representation of the waveform, and we're not just talking about single
sine waves here. These are two different issues.

It may well be that imaging improves with higher smaple rates, unless of
course you dither properly at the lower ones. It's a little known fact
that dither can also have an effect in the time domain. Other things
including filter issues certainly can make higher sample rates sound
better. However, this has nothing to do with the waveform being
reproduced more accurately within the bandwidth of the system (i.e below
Nyquist for the particular sample rate).

--
Jay Frigoletto
Mastersuite
Los Angeles
promastering.com