Do you hear a difference?

[David A]

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

Jean-Marie,

I'm sorry I responded so strongly but after trying to be as precise as possible in my comments in order to acknowledge the views on both sides, I was extremely unhappy about seeing an implication that I had made a claim I was at pains to avoid making in a response which also said that the issue was in the domain of physics which deals with the properties of sound waves rather than biology and neuropsychology which study our hearing, and that any differences between live sound and a 44.1 Hz recording come down to non-linearities in equipment which totally ignores the  many quite deliberate choices made by recording engineers and which are irrelevant anyway when the argument is about whether there are audible differences between 2 recordings rather than between a recording and the live event.

All this started our from my response to Pim's statement that frequencies above the range of a CD was inaudible because it was above our hearing range. I agreed that frequencies above the range of a CD were inaudible but pointed out that in combination with other frequencies they could generate tones in the audible range. I've never suggested that anyone can hear anything above the range of their own hearing and in fact I clearly stated in my response that I was not suggesting we could hear sounds above the upper limit of our hearing range.

I will add that in his post above, @Confused comments that suggestions have been made that it's the 8 extra bits in 24 bit high res files that contribute to any audible difference. That is a possibility and it has nothing to do with the upper frequency limit of our hearing range. Most of the argument keeps getting limited to the audible hearing range while ignoring the number of bits and they shouldn't be ignored since they contribute to the sound we hear from high res recordings.

I'll call it quits on this topic as well, for similar reasons to you. That's a pity because the thread started with a question about whether or not we could hear a difference with high res recordings. It appears that the only non-contentious answer to that question is that we're all still getting bogged down in arguments about that and that there is no agreement about the answer.