Thinking of going PRO

Yes.

Well, no. You can't make your soundcard work at a higher samplerate than the one their manufacturers made it do, right?

Fixed it for you.

The average adult (male) listener can't tell a 16/44.1 wave file from an mp3, let alone something rendered at higher sample rates/frequencies.

Our first year engineering physics prof did an interesting experiment; he brought in an audio sound generator, and started the frequency quite low - 220 maybe.  He had us all stand up, and when we could no longer hear the sound as he increased the frequency, we were to sit down.

When the frequency got to 18 kHz there was a handful of students left standing out of an original 150 or so.  At 20 kHz there was one guy left, and he looked like he was 14 years old.  Remember there is a strong tendency to remain standing after the sound is gone.

Do a test - render a wave, save it and convert to mp3.  Have someone else help with a listening test by playing them back - without the test subject knowing which file is being played.  I'd be interested in the results.

I'm not suggesting that the musician members of this forum are average - far from it - but who is in your listening audience?  And how many of us are still teenagers?

There may be an advantage with higher rates/frequencies in that better equipment will produce the audible ones better, but I'm a skeptic when it comes to numbers like 192.

Glenn

Well, if the theoretical range of human hearing is 20Hz to 20Khz, and if CD recordings are approximately twice that highest frequency, or 44.1Khz, so that the full range of human hearing can be represented, I think that 192Khz is probably overkill.
Then take into consideration that the highest note of a piano is about 4186Hz. Even with overtones, what does that bring us up to? 7-8000Hz?
And even considering room acoustics, reverb etc. individual sensitivities to sound that may not yet be scientifically quantifiable, I'd bet money on 96Khz being more than enough, and that much higher than 44-48Khz is probably indiscernible to the vast majority of people.

Try to play Pianoteq through a spectrum analyzer and see how much over 10 khz there is  ;-)

so does that mean that an MP3 is a reasonable format for listening to solo piano work (realizing that recording techniques vary greatly...)?

MP3s use standard sample rates of 44.1kHz or 48kHz, so you don't necessarily lose any high frequencies. Depending on the bitrate though, the frequencies you do hear will be variably quantized or discarded, giving rise to the reduced audible quality. The higher the bitrate, the better it sounds. Also, the simpler the signal, ie the less "busy" the spectrum, the easier it is to encode more accurately, and the better it will sound. So some pure and simple solo piano music might encode very well at moderate bitrate. The quality of the encoder matters too!

But boehnbr was asking a rhetorical question? MP3's seriously degrade the sound of any instrument. I hear it the most with women singers. Kills the bass and upper midrange and treble. My first sense of how much the sound changes came from listening to Julie London on vinyl and then on an mp3, but I've had the same impression listening to other singers, comparing wave files with mp3's. Cry me a river...

Same thing with pianos, but I don't notice it as much unless I hear a wave file and an mp3 file of the same piece side by side. The volume level seems to go down too, but I'm not sure why.