In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Nospam has provided a link in the past. I think an organisation called
the American Acoustic Society carried out a series of tests and then
reported the inability of people to discriminate between various
standards of highness of fi. Unfortunately, although full descriptions
were not given, there appeared to have been various standards of
everything including environment, source, amplifier and speakers. The
people carrying out the tests were well meaning but I think they were
wasting their time.

translated: they didn't get the results you wanted.

Translated: they were a bunch of amatuers. I would pay much more
attention to them if the tests were conducted by a good experimental
psychologist.

feel free to cite a double-blind test that shows that people can
reliably tell the difference between 24/192k and 16/44k from the same
source.

also feel free to cite a double-blind test that shows that people can
reliably tell the difference between analog and digital from the same
source.

I know of no satisfactory double-blind tests -period.
http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/ba...l_thinking.htm

There have been some AXB tests which are open to interpretation. See
for example

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-m...01-24-vs-16-bi
t-not-audible.html
or http://tinyurl.com/o63vybl

24 bit gives more dynamic range that 16 bit. that's all.

16 bit (96db) is already pushing the limits of human hearing (120db is
threshold of pain), especially if you take into account normal
background noise in a house, so there's no advantage to 24 bit for
listening purposes.

in other words, if you want to hear the quiet passages, the loud
passages are going to *hurt* with a cd, and that's assuming that the
music has 96db dynamic range which just about all does not.

if you're going to use it for mastering and make changes, then 16/192k
helps, but not because of audible differences. it's for minimizing
errors in the math.

Not a double-blind test - but:

I have a set of vinyl records of the complete organ works of Bach
recorded by Peter Hurford.
I have a set of CDs of the same records recorded from the original
masters used for the vinyls.

it might be *from* the original master recording but it is not mastered
the same when making the cd.

the proper test is to take a vinyl record, make a cd recording and then
compare those.

since a cd can contain everything the vinyl record can with room to
spare, it's *guaranteed* that they will be identical and this is
mathematically provable.

There is no doubt of which set I prefer. There is an audible
difference in ambience and the vinyls win every time.

the key is that the cd version can sound just like vinyl, if that's
what you want. just add back the distortion.