Job M. van Zuijlen wrote:
> 
> I have been following the professional audio industry for 30 years and
> there is hype, occasionally.

I'm glad someone else pointed this out. I am no expert on pro audio (I'm
a bit chagrined that M. Gogins has refuted some of my ignorant claims
about pro audio gear... well, you live and learn).  But I have done
quite a bit of lurking on rec.audio.pro (though not in the last six
months or so) and it's worth noting that the resident gurus over there
do not always agree with each other about these things. There is no
reason to assume that the pro audio industry is immune to faddism and
hype; with the current level of technology and the much-lamented lack of
blind testing, I think it is entirely possible that there is quite a bit
of gear currently being sold on merits that people are taking on faith.
I think I can hear the difference between sampling rates of 44.1 kHz and
48 kHz, at least in some cases, but I can't eliminate the possibility of
placebo effect; and I have yet to hear about a blind test that
demonstrates that 96 kHz has any merits over 48 kHz.

I've read some arguments that 96 kHz was a big mistake because it is not
trivial to smoothly convert 96 kHz to 44.1 kHz (which will, like it or
not, remain the primary delivery format for some years yet); 88.2 kHz
would have given almost the same amount of (presumed) improvement in
sound while greatly reducing that problem. This makes very good
intuitive sense to me, and I have not seen a single counter-argument.
Yet 96 kHz gear, not 88.2, is being advertised like crazy in all the
studio-gear magazines.

And then there's the _real_ lone nuts in the wilderness, who claim that
PCM was a mistake from the get-go, and we should be converting
everything to some sort of 1-bit, extremely-high-sampling-rate
technology that Sony is now using for archival masters; they claim that
this blows the pants off of every other format currently in use (in part
by eliminating the anti-aliasing filters). Who knows. I don't even
understand how this system works. Too bad it's completely incompatible
with all existing software and hardware... I wonder if those guys are
right, and I wonder if we'll ever get to find out; or if we're now stuck
with PCM regardless. 

But it's all kind of an academic point for me anyway since I'll be
working with a sub-$100 16-bit soundcard for the foreseeable future
(maybe that's why I'm more concerned with keeping csound speedy than
with increasing its precision.. I feel the speed limits every time I use
csound, but I have never noticed problems with lack of resolution
(except in cases where I really needed an interpolating loscil and there
wasn't one... I think this has been added recently)).