Mapman: No hidden agenda here. I've been reading KR's site for several years for his photography reviews and when he started writing about audio I was pleased to hear his perspective. I just thought this was a well-thought out article with a lot of technical stuff that might be of interest on this forum.
I'm still not sold on his premise that 44.1/16 is enough bits, as I've heard some pretty great 96/24 stuff, but I have to say that I've heard A LOT of great 44.1/16 stuff too.
I remember reading about a blind-test done a while back regarding SACD. The testers had people listen to SACD, and then the same music, but with an ADC-DAC in the chain between the SACD player and the preamp. The testers changed the ADC-DAC conversion rate for various tests, and found that a statistically significant number of subjects could not tell the difference between the pure SACD signal and Redbook. I wish I could find the link to this test somewhere. I'd also be interested to see the results of the same test but with LPs as the original source.
Of course the quality of the SACD player has a big impact on a study like this.
I'm still not sold on his premise that 44.1/16 is enough bits, as I've heard some pretty great 96/24 stuff, but I have to say that I've heard A LOT of great 44.1/16 stuff too.
I remember reading about a blind-test done a while back regarding SACD. The testers had people listen to SACD, and then the same music, but with an ADC-DAC in the chain between the SACD player and the preamp. The testers changed the ADC-DAC conversion rate for various tests, and found that a statistically significant number of subjects could not tell the difference between the pure SACD signal and Redbook. I wish I could find the link to this test somewhere. I'd also be interested to see the results of the same test but with LPs as the original source.
Of course the quality of the SACD player has a big impact on a study like this.