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Originally Posted by troutman
Over thousands of samples by hundreds of participants the higher resolution file was identified something like 49.5% of the time, so basically they were completely guessing.
Thank you for that - I have often wondered if lay people can hear a difference.
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Even professionals haven't been able to demonstrably tell the difference. In one study I'm familiar with a good number of the participants were audio engineers and they were only very slightly better at determining which was the higher resolution recording and even then they were still well within the realm of simply guessing (I think they were correct 51 or 52% of the time).
Interestingly though, that same study did show that using the high resolution SACD and downsampling it to CD level tended to sound better than just using the normal CD of the same recording. The reason for this is that SACDs are generally mastered to achieve the best sound possible with a wide dynamic range whereas most modern recordings are mastered to sound as loud as possible and to sound decent on crappy playback gear.
So like I said above, if these higher resolution releases creates access to better masters then it could be a good thing, but it's not the resolution that's going to improve the sound. 192khz files are like having an amp that goes to 11.
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Personally, I never was convinced that vinyl sounded better than CDs. NPR had a blog about that and I posted it in another thread one time.
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They usually sound different, but whether it's "better" is really just a matter of opinion. The distortion that generally accompanies vinyl can sound great in some types of music, but it's not a big difference IMO and it's nowhere near important enough for me to forgo everything else that's better about digital music.
I think part of the issue is that a lot of these things like higher bitrates are useful and can have clearly tangible benefits in music production. But when it comes to simple playback of a mixed and mastered recording, most of that doesn't really matter at all.