Digital audio listening test

[Goddard, Duncan]

>>>2) Anyone have any idea why Radar3 recorder has 192kHz sampling rate 
> ( I would assume that they are telling lies but new compact Mackies
> also have stated channel bandwidth of 190kHz ? Also , friend of
> mine recorded some guys doing some classical string stuff and they
> refused 48k dat recording and used analog recorder instead . And
> finally I run on article on web that tells some strange things about
> over 20khz human hearing ability . Whats up with all this ?)<<<
> 
> 
I have a copy of "audio media" magazine from 1993 in which no lesser than rupert neve himself describes some listening tests he carried out in the late 1970s after discovering a wiring fault in one of his mixing consoles at a major london studio; basically, geoff emerick (a well-known music producer of the time, ex-BBC) had noticed a subtle difference between two adjacent channels on this console and when the offending channel was examined, neve discovered that one end of a coil hadn't been soldered in properly. this had the effect of giving the channel a flatter hf response *beyond 30kHz*. now, traditional thinking (and indeed, the thinking behind the choice of sample rates) would have you believe that this difference would be inaudible. rupe was prompted to investigate by doing blind tests in which the listeners were asked to say whether a 9kHz signal was sinusoidal or square. most listeners (over 70% anyway) got it right every time. the implication is that there's some mechanism whereby a human can detect frequencies way beyond the accepted limit of 15-20kHz.
this has been reflected recently in the growing number of manufacturers producing high-sample-rate digital recorders, and in the return to popularity of non-digital recording equipment (which doesn't impose an upper frequency limit quite as harshly as digital gear).
anyone else heard anything about this?

d.


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