I'm convinced that we can "hear" frequencies well above the reputed 20KHz limit of human hearing, as overtones, i.e. as tonal quality.
I certainly don't have golden ears; I'm no audiophile, and I'm getting on in years. 44KHz FLAC is easily good enough for me. But I tire of listening to MP3 music, after a few tens of minutes; it seems to lack the presence and immediacy that keeps me interested.
Not really. I'm not proposing a hypothesis that needs testing; I'm just reporting subjective anecdata. I don't need to test it, because even if I'm deluded it costs me 300GB instead of 100GB. Pfft.
"Lying to yourself" is silly talk; that implies that I'm knowingly telling myself a falsehood, which doesn't make sense. At worst, I'm mistaken.
>that implies that I'm knowingly telling myself a falsehood
You are aware of a common fact backed up by mountains of empirical data, a strong physical explanation, and fundamentals of information theory, but tell yourself this lie:
>I'm convinced that we can "hear" frequencies well above the reputed 20KHz limit of human hearing
This is a lie. You tell it to yourself. You must see this.
If frequencies abover 20Khz are causing audible differences in the audible frequency range then that's considered distortion and there's an issue in your playback chain somewhere.
I certainly don't have golden ears; I'm no audiophile, and I'm getting on in years. 44KHz FLAC is easily good enough for me. But I tire of listening to MP3 music, after a few tens of minutes; it seems to lack the presence and immediacy that keeps me interested.