From Kent Williams Sent Fri, Feb 19th 1999, 15:27
On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Mark Kolmar wrote: > On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, ChairCrusher wrote: > > > I'd like to see some rigorous blind tests with a large number of people > > to see who can actually hear the difference between 24/96 and 16/44. > > Knowing how variable these things are, I'd guess that only a relatively > > small percentage of people could really hear the difference [...] > > I can detect a very small difference between 16 bit and 24 bit processing > at 44.1KHz. But then I am among the maybe 1% of people for whom speaker > wire thicker than 16 guage is a relevant concern. Blessing or curse? If > for example your speaker wires are different lengths for the left and > right channels, and you don't notice a problem, the extra bits and > potential frequency response are not going to mean much. > Mark I know you're a good person, and I like nice audio gear as much as the next guy but do the math: Electricity travels in a perfect medium at the speed of light; through copper wire it travels some fraction of that. The only specific references I've found on the net suggest that a real-world figure would be something on the order of a meter every 1/5,000,000 of a second. In other words, 200 nanoseconds per meter. If you have two speaker cables -- one 3 meters long, and the other twice as long, the phase error between the speakers would amount to 600 nanoseconds, or just under 1 millionth of a second. Are you telling me you can hear phase errors in the microsecond domain?