Quote:
The CD reproduction depicted in that graph is indistinguishable from the original. The tone is 10KHz, and the CD reproduction clearly has a very strong 10KHz component. The difference between the CD reproduction and the original tone consists entirely of frequencies too high to hear. The people who chose the sampling frequency of CD audio were not idiots, they were audio engineers. The subsequent people who chose a higher frequency for DVD audio were also not idiots, but they were marketers. 192KHz audio is snake oil. AFAIK no human listener has ever distinguished 44.1KHz audio from 192KHz audio in a double-blind test.

I would bet with the right source, one could.

Remember that with digital sampling, you have to limit the source to less than half the sampling rate to prevent aliasing, leaving only 22khz. 12khz sounds would be made of four level changes.

When CDs first came out, I was into classical big time, and I found the violins nasty sounding. Very distorted. This is really the only instrument that I could hear a difference on, but it was a big one.

Fairly quickly, the engineers did learn to manipulate the bits to get frequency response above 12khz without aliasing. Sony had a line of digital recorders with Super Bit Mapping (SBM) that did this. I bought one for encoding my classical LPs, since at that time nasty encodings of classical works was the norm. The Sony thing did work well, but I never use it any more. I still listen to those encoded LPs...