Download the sample file from here and listen. Unless your equipment is not capable of reproducing beyond 20 kHz or you are 99 years old you will easily hear alternative patterns of different tone. One is a 7 kHz sin wave and another is "artificially constructed" square wave composed of 7 kHz base and 21 kHz 3rd harmonic. The video explaining this effect is:
. Comments in video will tell you that other people hear it as well. I can, everyone reading this should.
Short explanation. No, almost nobody can hear a sin wave beyond 18 kHz, however anyone can tell a sin wave from a square wave at 7 kHz, even though the square wave is made of the 3rd 21 kHz harmonic. It happens because our ears and our brain are not doing the Fourier transform, even the fast one. We hear the shape of a wave in its entirety, not as a spectrum of harmonics. It doesn't matter that the audio equipment requires 21 kHz to store the 7 kHz square wave - our brain is unrelated to the electrical circuits, it works differently.
If you follow this forum: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...re-wave-sound-the-same-as-a-sine-wave.287452/ that young people can hear harmonics up to 45 kHz and 60 years old people can hear 30 kHz.
Is there any music material that high? Yes. Skipping exotic instruments that go to 100 kHz, just an ordinary violin music goes to 40 kHz. And again, our brain will not decompose the sound of a piano key/ violin into 30 harmonics as the sound chain will, they process the strange shape of those instruments sound in their entirety. So with the Nyquist filter set at 40 kHz, a 16 bit / 80 kHz transmission media is necessary to play a violin and a grand piano. 24 bit / 96 kHz is realistically speaking not necessary, but if it exists as a standard nothing wrong with having it.
And btw the simple proof that 16 bits are not enough is that dithered music sounds better than un-dithered. Dithering is destroying the music information. If we did not hear the step between two adjacent digits in 16 bits the dithering would not be necessary, as it's not necessary for 24 bit music. Enjoy.
Short explanation. No, almost nobody can hear a sin wave beyond 18 kHz, however anyone can tell a sin wave from a square wave at 7 kHz, even though the square wave is made of the 3rd 21 kHz harmonic. It happens because our ears and our brain are not doing the Fourier transform, even the fast one. We hear the shape of a wave in its entirety, not as a spectrum of harmonics. It doesn't matter that the audio equipment requires 21 kHz to store the 7 kHz square wave - our brain is unrelated to the electrical circuits, it works differently.
If you follow this forum: https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...re-wave-sound-the-same-as-a-sine-wave.287452/ that young people can hear harmonics up to 45 kHz and 60 years old people can hear 30 kHz.
Is there any music material that high? Yes. Skipping exotic instruments that go to 100 kHz, just an ordinary violin music goes to 40 kHz. And again, our brain will not decompose the sound of a piano key/ violin into 30 harmonics as the sound chain will, they process the strange shape of those instruments sound in their entirety. So with the Nyquist filter set at 40 kHz, a 16 bit / 80 kHz transmission media is necessary to play a violin and a grand piano. 24 bit / 96 kHz is realistically speaking not necessary, but if it exists as a standard nothing wrong with having it.
And btw the simple proof that 16 bits are not enough is that dithered music sounds better than un-dithered. Dithering is destroying the music information. If we did not hear the step between two adjacent digits in 16 bits the dithering would not be necessary, as it's not necessary for 24 bit music. Enjoy.
