Our fathers and grandfathers did not have better hearing than us, so luckily our culture does not often use any instruments that are supposed to play notes higher than 12 kHz. At the age that you are able to afford hi-fi gear, it is much more likely that your hearing capability stops at around 17 kHz. When scientists say that we can hear 20 – 20 kHz they are being generous. It’s important for a healthy mindset to have these heroes that help us push beyond “limits”, but for hearing, it’s recommended to stay on the ground and stick with facts. This might be because our childhood heroes are not politicians or scientists, but because our heroes can fly, go invincible, accumulate insane strength, etc.

The Human HearingĮverybody thinks they have special powers. I absolutely recommend watching this YouTube video from about digital audio. Remember, the amplitude is captured by bit depth, not by the sampling rate. That means a 44,1 kHz sampling rate is enough to capture and reproduce all sounds up to 20 kHz. So if you want to reproduce a tone of 20.000 Hz, you need more than 40.000 samples per second. The amount needed is more than two dots per sine. The digital data only contains information on how to reproduce sine waves. Sample RateĬontrary to popular belief or false marketing, digital audio does not have any bars or steps in the audio information. As a result, higher resolution results in lower noise. Even though the actual loudness is not the important factor, its resolution decides about the amount of quantization errors that rounded values create when applying a numeric value to the amplitude of a tone. It says how much loudness information the audio can carry. It is measured in dB on a bit depth scale. Dynamic range is per definition the resolution of the audio.

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