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RE: Nothing dogmatic, I actually listen to music!

It is mathematically impossible to truncate those high frequencies without performing some kind of filtering. Filtering creates artifacts. Whether one "hears" the absence of the high frequencies or "hears" the artifacts of the filtering is moot, in either case there is a detrimental effect on the sound. Teresa is an audio reviewer, not a scientist, engineer or mathematician, so it's appropriate to cut her some slack when it comes to attributing causes to the effects that she hears.

My Mytek DAC will play DSD recordings and it offers a choice of low pass filters, which are used to reduce the high frequency noise from the 1 bit format. On my system, the 70 kHz filter sounds better than the 50 kHz or 60 kHz alternatives. My speakers supposedly reproduce 40 kHz, but when it comes to sine waves my old ears only go to 13.5 kHz on a good day. I could care less "why" one filter sounds better than the other, all I did was listen to the three alternatives and picked the one that sounded best.

You may not get the best results with headphones. Ultrasonic energy affects other parts of the body as well as the ears. The same can be said of low bass, but with different parts of the body. Also, imaging is not correct with normal two channel recordings played back on headphones, which makes it difficult to perceive alterations in the sound stage caused by playback chain artifacts.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Nothing dogmatic, I actually listen to music! - Tony Lauck 09/6/1209:50:12 09/6/12 (0)

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