[Audio Empire]

Attended an AES seminar today given by John Vanderkooy of the University of
Waterloo, Waterloo Ontario entitled: "A Digital-Domain Listening Test for
High-Resolution Audio"

Vanderkooy maintained that he has no doubt, after many ABX and DB tests
performed at the University that "...some people can, reliably, and in a
statistically meaningful way, detect the differences between 16-bit, 44.1 KHz
audio and the same program material recorded at 24-bit and 176.4 or 192 KHz."
He also added that there are also many people who CANNOT hear these
differences in a statistically meaningful way, so the jury is still out on
the efficacy or need for high-resolution digital audio.

Several comments made by Mr Vanderkooy that I found very interesting: (1) He
felt that 44.1 KHz was chosen too hastily as the standard and that the
industry would have done better to settle on 48 KHz. (2) If one is mastering
in high-resolution with an eye to the resultant product being Redbook CD,
then it would be better to use 176.4 Khz than to use 192 KHz because 176.4 is
an exact multiple of 44.1.

During the Q&A session which followed Mr. Vanderkooy's presentation, a number
of recording engineers in the audience voiced opinions about working with
high-resolution masters. Several said that in their experience, the session
musicians preferred high-resolution capture overwhelmingly, stating that in
playback, they found the instruments to sound more like what they heard when
actually playing the instruments than did the same material captured at
16/44.1. One British recording engineer from TELDEC stated that harmonically
rich instruments like violin, cymbals, and marimbas sound threadbare and
missing in harmonic richness when captured at standard CD resolution. He used
an example that when these instruments are playing, there are harmonically
related ultrasonic sounds at say, 24 KHz and 27 KHz (chosen as an example to
illustrate the point) that "beat" in the air to form a 3KHz difference signal
and without good wide-band recordings, these harmonically related "beats" are
lost in playback. I wanted to ask this guy after the session "if this 3KHz
difference signal is formed in the air of the venue between the instrument
and the microphone, was it not simply picked up by the microphone at that
time? Certainly, any good condenser mike can pick-up any 3KHz sound in the
room and even 16-bit/44.1 KHz can certainly quantize it, why does he feel
that it is necessary for the process to preserve the ultrasonic harmonics
that form this "beat" frequency?" But he got away from me before I was able
to catch up with him.

All in all a very enlightening and interesting paper. I have a copy of it and
believe me I will study it carefully of the next few days to glean as much as
possible from it.