[LG V10 General] br0adband:
As an audio recording engineer as a partial career (for 25+ years) and as a hobby, I care very much about the quality of audio reproduction on today's audio devices which is why whenever I see people going for these types of placebo "fixes" for the most part I practically am compelled to point out that human hearing has limits and just throwing more bits into the mix (pun very much intended) isn't always going to make a difference.

The reason that audio professionals use "more bits" and higher sampling rates is to provide overhead to work with in the recording and mixdown processes - that was the case years past and nothing has changed. But the Nyquist theorem and the practical applications of it for digital audio recording and reproduction purposes with respect to the classic "CD quality" of 16 bit samples taken at a rate 44.1 kHz is pretty much what human hearing is capable of and nothing's going to change that anytime soon.

Now, having said that, and while I make no such claims as I'm getting older and my high end response with my own ears is taking a nosedive, some folks out there have 'golden ears' and are very capable of noticing the difference in some audio formats, sure, I get that and I'm happy to admit that it's absolutely true. I've worked with people in studio situations that heard stuff even dogs and cats took note of while nobody else in the booth could even consciously hear but those are fairly rare individuals.

If you happen to be one of those folks, congrats, enjoy it while that ability lasts because it won't forever - we humans are basically downhill from the moment of birth in our physical attributes like hearing so make the best of it.

But the simple facts remain: 16 bit 44.1 kHz is still the standard, still what CDs are produced to match, and yes the original source material is mixed down to that standard from higher bit and sampling rates because that sort of thing helps keep the quality after all the damned processing that modern music of pretty much all kinds gets put through.

And I haven't even discussed lossy encoding which literally throws away up to 90% of the original material in the encoding process but I suppose you folks pushing all this high bit/sample rate nonsense are going to stick to your guns regardless.

If you're absolutely convinced and believe you can and do hear a difference with whatever hardware and source material you're using, nobody - especially not me - is going to change that belief and I get that, I really do, but it won't stop me from pointing out the fact(s) that humans by and large aren't really that capable.

I've sat in on A/B testing for some pretty prestigious studios in the past during some recording and encoding sessions testing new hardware, etc, and I've never met anyone that could A/B some particular formats 100% of the time - the best I've ever encountered was one guy that maintained a 51% rating meaning 51% of the time he could pick the higher quality source material from a wide variety of source material. He scored less quite often but never ever broke the 51% rating.

That's so close to 50-50 I still consider it guessing for the most part but he swore up and down till you wanted to shoot him to shut him up that he distinctly heard a difference every single time without fail even though the testing results were pretty clear, especially on the numerous instances of him not hitting his "baseline" 51%.

Anyway, you folks enjoy what you've got, I'm just a guy that loves good music recorded and encoded properly, and that doesn't happen that much in the loudness war (yes, I said it, I wasn't going to but I did). :D