Do you hear a difference?

[Jean-Marie]

I’m fully aware that two tones can combine to generate lower tones. However if you can hear it, it is because it is in your hearing range. And if it is, it will adequately be captured and produced by the chaîne limited to your hearing threshold. 

My point is that anything that you would have heard being present in front of the real thing, you will hear it from a 44.1 kHz recording. If a higher recording leaves you hear something different, this is something that is produced by the non linearities of complete chain, creating artifacts in the audible bands that were not there if you were listening to the real thing. 

I’m sorry, physics is a hard science and cascading 3 low pass filters: the one in the ADC, the one in the DAC and our ear is dominated by the lowest one which is our ear. 
In that case, the only way to have higher frequency than this lowest low pass filter to have any effect is to have non linearities before that last filter. 

Jean-Marie

I- What's physics got to do with it? We're talking about what we hear and that gets studied in biology and neuropsychology which are different fields entirely. Physics is relevant to the sounds produced by our gear but when it comes to whether we can hear a difference between high res and CD quality recordings physics tells us about what the differences in the sounds produced by those recordings are but not about what we hear when we listen to them.

2- what's the relevance of the 3 cascading filter bit? I've never suggested we can hear anything outside our hearing range so the fact that our ears are the limiting factor is something I've acknowledged from the start.

3- you can hear lots of things in a CD quality recording that you would not have heard at the live performance and many of those things have nothing to do with non-linearities. They're due to differences in the sensitivity of the mics to the sensitivity of your ears, to the differences in where the mics are located to where you sit, to how multiple channels are mixed in recordings and the ways in which the engineer adjusts the levels from different channels which can easily  produce a different balance in levels between instruments and voices than you would hear at the performance, and how the eventual recording is finally mastered. And all of those differences are irrelevant if what we're discussing is differences between 2 recordings of different resolution.

I have a university qualification in a health science related field. I've had to design and conduct a research study in order to get that qualification, I've presented those results at a scientific conference and I've had them published in a peer reviewed journal. It wasn't great or ground breaking research but I had to follow standard scientific practices so I do know something about the scientific method and all of that.

Do me a favour. Stop misrepresenting what I've said. Go back and read it carefully. I've never claimed we can hear things outside our hearing range or anything like that or what you're implying I said. And don't make ridiculous statements like "anything that you would have heard being present in front of the real thing, you will hear it from a 44.1 kHz recording" which are patently untrue as any recording engineer will tell you, and the reason it's untrue has nothing to do with physics or non-linearities.

There is still no widely accepted scientific evidence that we can hear differences between high res and CD quality sound but there's also no evidence that we can't hear differences. People are still arguing about it and people are still conducting tests. The jury is still out. I have been at pains to avoid saying that there is a difference though I have said that I think I hear one which is a very different claim. I also said that I could be mistaken and that I'm not trying to convince anyone to start buying high res recordings.

I've been as scrupulously honest as I can be in what I've said. Why don't you try being as honest about what I've said as I've been and why don't you stop making statements like "anything that you would have heard being present in front of the real thing, you will hear it from a 44.1 kHz recording" which are simply wrong.

David,

If I had offended you, please accept my apologies since it was not my intend. 

I will stop on the topic, since I don’t want to risk spoiling this forum which so far has avoided the pitfall of uncourteous discussion and obviously my answers come across as such. 

Best regards,

Jean-Marie