GStreamer: Past, present, and future

Posted Oct 30, 2010 0:12 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: GStreamer: Past, present, and future by dlang
Parent article: GStreamer: Past, present, and future

I think the existence of inaudible dog whistles is serious blow against your hypothesis. We've had a much longer experience with audio frequencies near the edge of human perception than you would perhaps realize at first blush. Much of that history pre-dates any attempt at digital sampling. If 99.9% of people can't perceive dog whistles at 22 Khz, they aren't going to hear it played on their Alpine speakers in their car either.

Video framing on the other hand is relatively quite new...unless you count thumb powered flipbooks pen and paper animations.

-jef

GStreamer: Past, present, and future

Posted Oct 30, 2010 15:01 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

For all of our experience with audio, there was a small subset of us who were driven absolutely nuts by the weird high-pitched chirper things that the Japanese seem to like to put into doorways for whatever reason. Everybody else wondered what we were griping about. Some people hear higher than others.

The other thing that nobody has pointed out: if you're sampling at 44KHz, you need a pretty severe low-pass filter if you want to let a 20KHz signal through. That will cause significant audio distortion at the upper end of the frequency range, there's no way to avoid it. A higher sampling rate lets you move the poles up much higher where you don't mess with stuff in the audio range.

That said, I'm not such an audiophile that I'm not entirely happy with CD-quality audio.