"Chesney Christ" wrote in message

A certain Jim H, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Is it possible that, back then, the DACs were only effective up to a
certain rate, at a lower rate than for the ear?

Nope.

, say the DACS
showed no improvement in sound past 44kHz, your experiment would
always show cd to be optimal. Just a thought.

If you want to understand the limitations of he ear vis-a-vis 44 KHz
sampling, please do some listening with the files you can download from
http://www.pcabx.com/technical/low_pass/index.htm .

AFAIK (Dave P would know more about this than me) the early ADCs
weren't capable of 16 bits of resolution; they clocked in around 14
bits. I always thought this was another good reason why remastered
recordings often sound so much better.

Nahh, the usual reason why remastered recordings sound better is that the
original mastering work was so bad, or had different goals.

In some cases the original mastering work appears to have been non-existent.
In other cases it had the goal of making a top-30 hit that grabs the ears,
while the remastering typically concentrates more on natural sound quality.