They’d had engineers from the company there, and so on. The danger is that if you are not sensitive to people like Geoff Emerick, and you don’t respect them for what they have done, then you are not going to listen to them. Unfortunately, there was a breed of young engineers in the company ( I hasten to say this was after I sold it !) who couldn’t understand what he was bitching about. So they went back to the company and just made a report saying the customer was mad and there wasn’t really a problem. Leave it alone, forget it, the problem will go away. They were acting like used car salesmen. I was very angry with it. So I went and spent time there, at George Martin’s request, and Geoff finally managed to show me what it was that he could hear, and then I began to hear it, too.

Now Geoff was The Golden Ears – and he still is – and he was perceiving something that I wasn’t looking for. And it wasn’t until I had spent some time with him, as it were, being lead by him through the sounds, that I began to pick up what he was listening to. And once I’d heard it, oh yes, then I knew what he was talking about. We measured it and found that in three out of the full 48 channels, the output transformers had not been correctly terminated and were producing a 3dB rise at 54kHz. And so people said, “oh no, he can’t possible hear that”. But when we corrected that problem, and it was only one capacitor that had to be added to each of those three channels, I mean, Geoff’s face just lit up ! Here you have the happiness/ unhappiness mood thing the Japanese were talking about.”

– Rupert Neve, from “Audio Technology Magazine” Issue 1, March/ April 1998

Good electronics extend well beyond 20Khz. The issue isn’t whether or not you can hear that high. The issue is the harmonic structure of instruments that certain extends beyond our hearing and “beats” back into frequencies we can hear. When you cut them off sharply and artificially as 44.1K/16 bit audio does, the brain is not fooled even if the person is.

How many recordings have meaningful content at or above 20Khz – especially older recordings from the 70s and earlier.?

Has anyone tried an experiment where frequencies above 20Khz are switched in and out, to test whether the difference is perceptible?

I am on both sides of the fence here – I love vinyl and agree that it often sounds better, but I’ve tended to attribute the difference more to mastering and sources than inherent capabilities.

Tim