Re: (idm) 24bit 96kHz format

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?