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No -- it isn't ultrasonic. I don't understand why this misconception persists; perhaps some people are confusing noise shaping with ringing. Totally different concepts.
In this context, there seems to have been some equivocation in this thread over the use of the words "theory" and "theorem."
I had a conversation not so long ago with somebody who didn't said that they believe the "sampling theory." (sic.)
Theorem means proven, and it is no more a "theory" than, say, Pythagoras' Theorem, which has and will always give the correct result for the length of the unknown side of a right-angled triangle.
(OK, "real-world" triangles such as one drawn on a piece of paper are bound to be "imperfect" and deviate from an "idealised" right-angled triangle; but, in an abstract/mathematical sense, that's not the point...)
176 khz recording of cymbal hit very hard once with drum stick. Notice how it starts at low level and builds. That is because it takes a finite time for the energy to travel across the metal of the cymbal, reflect from the edge, and build to a resonance at higher level. So even hard struck cymbals are NOT like a Dirac pulse thru the ADC/DAC.
For the sake of completeness, synthetically generated sounds, which are after all found on a large proportion of today's recordings, are not subject to physical limitations.
Also, the attack phases of acoustic sounds could be altered by post-processing--e.g. removing the initial attack phase in a waveform editor, or "overshoot" (resulting in a more "impulsive" envelope) as a result of (dynamic range) compressor action.
For the sake of completeness, synthetically generated sounds, which are after all found on a large proportion of today's recordings, are not subject to physical limitations.
They are still subject to a lot of physical limitations. If nothing else, most of the "synthetically generated sounds" come from synthesizers and digital audio workstations with limited sample rates.
They are still subject to a lot of physical limitations. If nothing else, most of the "synthetically generated sounds" come from synthesizers and digital audio workstations with limited sample rates.
Obviously nothing can be generated above Nyquist; but generating a Dirac pulse in DSP is absolutely trivial.
(In digital synthesis, Nyquist rears its ugly head in the form of aliasing, but that's another matter.)
Generally, the "control" parts of digital synthesizers, e.g. for the amplitude envelope, run at a fraction of the sample rate. Furthermore, the "classical" (subtractive) synthesizer signal path consists of oscillators fed into a low pass filter. So, those are two possible limitations for the synth's output per se (i.e. not withstanding further post-processing.)
Indeed. A Dirac delta function cannot be realised; it's a purely theoretical tool. A very useful theoretical tool, mind you...
As wiki says:
"It is used to model the density of an idealized point mass or point charge as a function equal to zero everywhere except for zero and whose integral over the entire real line is equal to one.[1][2][3]As there is no function that has these properties, the computations made by the theoretical physicists appeared to mathematicians as nonsense until the introduction of distributions by Laurent Schwartz to formalize and validate the computations."
Indeed, but in the discrete-time domain it is the "impulse" in impulse response.
Actual "problems" for filters in the discrete-time systems, limited by the absence of infinity in time/frequency domains as relevant, are that for an FIR filter the impulse response must be truncated/windowed, and for an IIR filter the response deviates from the (idealised) "analogue prototype" towards Nyquist (severe cramping with a basic bilinear transform, albeit these days most IIR DSP filter implementations should at least have an improved "decrampled" (Orfandis) response.)