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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

What is good enough?

Unless there's evidence to show that we need to accurately reproduce > 20kHz, I remember speaking to an engineer friend recently who insists that 50kHz sampling rate is more than adequate to allow essentially perfect reproduction to 20kHz with a bit of leeway given for imperfect filters in an imperfect world.

As for dynamic range, 21-bits is all we really need on the reproduction side since that's the limits of the best DAC's and I doubt many ADC's are capable of any better. Realistically, most music barely even gets close to 16-bit dynamic range anyways.

From my discussions with this friend then 24/50 (let's round up that 21-bits) is enough to capture everything. From my listening experience with hi-res files doing transcoding and conversions over the years, I have no reason to doubt this.

As an aside, I find it amazing that we audiophiles argue about DAC's so much that we barely talk about the ADC side and the miles of comparatively "nonaudiophile" cables, and relatively cheap jitter-prone 'pro' equipment used to capture the performance in the first place! I presume it's just because we have no control over that other side and the manufacturers also have nothing to sell us.

I wonder if anyone has looked at something like jitter issues between capturing audio at 24/96 vs. 24/192] on the equipment out there. I suspect issues like that would have more bearing on what we hear than stuff we tend to obsess over like which coaxial digital cable is better :-)

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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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