Since it's been a few years since I last checked with different gear, I did a 24/28 - 24/94 recording comparison last night on a couple pieces of avantgarde classical material in a pristine acoustic. Checking this afternoon on the big system and on my best phones (Mytek DAC>Senn HD650) I might hear a subtle difference, but can't really be sure. Need to do some more listening and file analysis. They both sound really good. Unfortunately it isn't something I can post.
This is something of "cheating yourself" i think. Such comparison makes sense when you sit under your phones and another person chooses the samples and you don'T know if a 96 kHZ file is running to your ears or not. I bet you will hear no difference under that scheme...
Yeah, ABX testing is a wonderful revealer.
Agreed. Yet my casual listening tests of the material I recorded this weekend were less about the existence of any perceptual difference at all in and of itself, and more about confirming my doubts about the significance of any difference when weighed against a 200% storage space burden increase for a near best-case scenario. If I had been convinced I heard much of a significant difference, I'd be more motivated to make the effort to set up an ABX test to confirm or refute it.
I also say that now that my playback is to the point where I doubt it is the limiting factor in the perception of the potential differences. The limiting factors in this case are likely to be either the limits of the recording gear and setup I used, the loss of sensitivity of my aging ears, or the hard limits of even youthful human hearing perception. The first is easily checked in a partial sense at least by looking to see if there is information captured above ~18-20kHz in the at the 96kHz files, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
One thing I don't doubt is that there was most certainly ultrasonic energy produced by the instrumentation I recorded for my tests this weekend on Friday and Saturday in the form of inharmonic high frequency energy from things like cymbals, triangles, chimes other struck metallic percussion, and harmonics from horns, possibly violins and other instruments. And compared to this
classical percussion consort type material, there is probably even more ultrasonic energy present from the cymbals and rim shots when I make on-stage recordings in close proximity to jazz drum kits, and from the often harmonically brighter timbre of jazz brass pointed mic-wards, but in both cases I’m talking about direct radiation of acoustic instruments known to produce significant enegry above 20kHz, not PA amplified/re-amplified sound.