Off duty BBQ lighter AKA Idris wrote:
everyone focuses on upper limit frequency response when talking about higher sample rates....
without considering what it might mean to transient impulse response...
This.
The only transient information one can "hear" is those within our limits anyway. We can feel shock waves below are hearing limit - and I'm sure above. But speakers can't properly reproduce a shock wave - too fast and too loud.
And Dans right - there isn't a such thing as a square wave. Also we only experience impulse responses bound by our own hearing bandwidths. The values we use in digital sampling go along with those natural characteristics.
Dots and samples ?Look up sinc functions and reconstruction filters.
an expert on this stuff i am not, however, my take on it all is this...
if you are doing classical 96k
if you are doing video 48k
everything else 44.1k
any other cogitating upon it is a little OTT and frankly seems to be nothing more then brain/knowledge flexing... not that having an intrinsic and thorough understanding of it all won't subconsciously help in the end product, but, that alone won't do anything to the end product as far as making it better without the creative content part first being there...
As Dan said it's all confusingly counter-intuitive, even to those of us that think we've got a bit of a grasp of it!
Another factor that muddies things further, is that when people say they can hear the difference between 48k & 96k sampling rate, what they are most likely hearing is the performance of crap analogue filters. At the higher sample rate you can have a much more gentle slope which means fewer phase and stability compromises.