[brewmarche]

> Now you could play it back wrong by emitting a sharp pulse f_s times per second with the indicated level. This will have a lot of frequency content above 20kHz and, in fact, above f_s/2. It will sounds all kinds of nasty.

Wouldn’t the additional frequencies be inaudible with the original frequencies still present? Why would that sound nasty?

[amluto]

Because the rest of the system is not necessarily designed to tolerate high frequency content gracefully. Any nonlinearities can easily cause that high frequency junk to turn back into audible junk.

This is like the issues xiphmont talks about with trying to reproduce sound above 20kHz, but worse, as this would be (trying to) play back high energy signals that weren’t even present in the original recording.

[brewmarche]

That would mean that higher sampling rates (which add more inaudible frequencies) could cause similar problems. OK xiphmont actually mentions that, sorry, I had only watched the video when I replied.