Double blind study last year suggests it is but I don’t believe it

While studies say CD sound is good enough for human ears many people don’t believe it

Your garden variety CD is sampled at 44 kHz with 16 bits of data. Most music today is heard on mp3s which are even lower data rates 1/11th of a CD. To me there is so little dynamics in MP3s.

Modern music is highly compressed and subject to clipping. The music is loud but has none of the dynamics or subtle details of CDs let alone vinyl.

Analog signal - wiki illustration

The sampling rate, sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per second (or per other unit) taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, it can be measured in samples per second (S/s), or hertz (Hz). The inverse of the sampling frequency is the sampling period or sampling interval, which is the time between samples. Wikipedia

digitally sampled music illustration Wiki

We are not hearing the music: we are hearing a high level digital sample of the music that our ears believe is the music. We fill in the blanks.

Does it sound as good as vinyl LPs or higher bit rate CDs?

An article in Mix Magazine The Emperor’s New Sampling Rate reports on a A/B/X test that debunks the need for higher sampling rates.

According to this study and others, people can only tell the difference between 44 kHz CDs and higher levels 50% of the time, which statistically means they could be guessing.

Some folks think it’s all simply wishful thinking on everybody’s part: The system costs more and has better specs; therefore, we make ourselves believe it sounds better. There’s something to that reasoning. Humans are a notoriously imperfect lot and tend to see and hear what we want to hear. Another very plausible reason is something that the authors discovered in their research. Despite the fact that no one could hear the difference in playback systems, they reported that “virtually all of the SACD and DVD-A recordings sounded better than most CDs — sometimes much better.” As it wasn’t the technology itself that was responsible for this, what was? The authors’ conclusion is because they are simply engineered better.

Maybe yes and maybe no. I can A/B vinyl and CDs and usually tell the better sound every time. Vinyl has more depth and detail.

Vinyl is of course esoteric and not convenient. You have to maintain a turntable system and compatible amplifier which takes much more money that listening on a iPod or CD player. LPs also have to be flipped over ever 20 to 35 minutes.

The logic behind the study is that 96 kHz and 192 kHz are just not close enough to the actual signal to make a difference. Vinyl as an analog source is much higher than just 96 kHz sampling.

Dolby HD which is part of Blu-Ray audio is supposed to deliver a “lossless” 7.1 channel signal that is identical to analog. It use a higher bit 24 bit data stream and 192 kHz.

Will it be any better? It is supposed to be like the original sound. There is 13 times more music data on the disk. Time will tell.

The audio codecs in use and their tech specs table: A Guide to Home Theatre