Hector Martin

Analog is great and fun and fascinating and good analog can sound great but. Stop. Claiming. It's. Fundamentally. Better. Than. Digital. It just isn't. Ever. CDs can reproduce the entirety of the human hearing range under all practical conditions. Full stop.

If you the words "infinite sample rates" or "time resolution" or "16 bits of dynamic range" or "24bit/192k" are now popping into your head as counterarguments, you need to watch this video and try again: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml …

44 kHz are OK, but higher sampling rate eases analog signal reconstruction with crappy filters. Also the ear has a dynamic range greater than 100 dB (16 bit allows 96 dB). But I agree that music e.g. rarely needs such a big DR.

16 bit allows more than 96dB dynamic range (watch that Xiph video, he demonstrates it). Using oversampling to ease ADC/DAC filter design is an implementation detail of ADCs/DACs; for the actual PCM audio representation, 44kHz is sufficient.

I know well the technique (I have used 24 bit ADCs such as CS5361 that internally are 1-bit with 192+ kHz oversampling). I could do the maths, but I don't think 44100 Hz are enough to cover e.g 120 dB that a good ear can hear).

Read https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html … (grep for 120dB if you must). In practice, 16 bits is more than enough for any practical situation.

Had a look to the video, and it cheats a bit :). It does increase SNR *only* on a reduced zone of the spectrum (and increases it in other zones). Thus it is effectively reducing overall noise when using e.g. A frequency weighting (to assimilate to human hearing).

But it is not correct (or at least not complete) just to say "it increases SNR beyond 96 dB". It only does it on a fraction of the spectrum (the fraction interesting to human hearing).