It's useful to think in terms of how our auditory system might have developed. Sensing low frequency vibrations is useful to survival. Sources that make such low frequencies are likely to be harmful. Very high frequencies beyond those used for localization, OTH, are unlikely to be important.
Then consider the mass of the auditory apparatus, an eardrum, three articulated bones with a muscle attached, one of which rocks on a fluid filled structure that houses hair cells along a membrane. Perturbation of these hair cells causes firing of nerve cells, and the firing of those nerve cells leads through higher processing to the perception of sound. Hardly the design for an ultra HF transducer.
Now the argument can be made that beating among higher harmonics can generate combinations tones that are in the audible range, but the harmonics themselves are of much lower levels than the primaries from which they are generated, and any combination tones are at an even lower level.
Disclosure: My doctoral and post doc work was in binaural processing, but most of my pre-retirement career was as a director of a research program then a research center, so I have been out of the technical loop for decades.
I go along with the long-standing notion of 20 to 20 KHz or even 30 to 15 KHz being full range for a speaker system, but I've come to prefer that LF below 80 Hz be handled by a servo-controlled sub. Soundstaging and transparancy are more important to me than absolute frequency range, but I do enjoy that vibration one feels when a big pipe is invoked, whether at an organ recital or in my home.
db
Then consider the mass of the auditory apparatus, an eardrum, three articulated bones with a muscle attached, one of which rocks on a fluid filled structure that houses hair cells along a membrane. Perturbation of these hair cells causes firing of nerve cells, and the firing of those nerve cells leads through higher processing to the perception of sound. Hardly the design for an ultra HF transducer.
Now the argument can be made that beating among higher harmonics can generate combinations tones that are in the audible range, but the harmonics themselves are of much lower levels than the primaries from which they are generated, and any combination tones are at an even lower level.
Disclosure: My doctoral and post doc work was in binaural processing, but most of my pre-retirement career was as a director of a research program then a research center, so I have been out of the technical loop for decades.
I go along with the long-standing notion of 20 to 20 KHz or even 30 to 15 KHz being full range for a speaker system, but I've come to prefer that LF below 80 Hz be handled by a servo-controlled sub. Soundstaging and transparancy are more important to me than absolute frequency range, but I do enjoy that vibration one feels when a big pipe is invoked, whether at an organ recital or in my home.
db