How Good Can Vinyl Sound?
Reply #14 – 2009-05-15 23:48:42
While it is not a slam dunk that tests involving pure tones and music will have signficiantly different results, this is no doubt one of them. Since there are very very few musical instruments with fundamentals > even 10 KHz, anything above 20 KHz is going to be a harmonic of some fundamental below 20 KHz. Unless the content > 20 KHz is very, very strong, its going to be masked by fundamentals and/or lower harmonics below 20 KHz. Or its simply going to fall below the limit of audibility, which is very high at frequencies this high. This would be a good time to post a spectral analysis of one of your 24/96 files... HA has a forum for doing this, so you don't need to line up space on your own. You could even post excerpts for others to listen to and/or analyze. If you look in the scientific section of HA, there's even a paper about perception that has some masking curves in it. If you scale them up to the 8-10 KHz range, they do a pretty good job of wiping out all but the strongest responses > 10 KHz. I'd really like to post a FLAC file of the LP here, but I recorded that 4 years ago at on a relative's turntable, and deleted it shortly afterwards (if only I knew back then... ). Anyway, as I said, the high-frequency roll-off ended at 30 kHz. So the energy was already down quite low at 22 kHz. Yes, agreed, most likely below the hearing threshold. Just thought I'd add this comment since the original discussion was about accurate representation of Vinyl sound. If you don't digitize the entire spectrum "coming out of a vinyl", then it's not an accurate representation, I'd say. I know about the masking curves at high frequencies. I posted some of them the other day Yes, if you consider masking, it's even more likely that anything beyond 20 kHz on an LP is inaudible. Still, there's something there The next time I get a hold of a turntable, I'll post a 24/96 FLAC. Chris