Comment Re:Probably not (Score 1) 431
On most modern recordings, you can low pass everything above 17-18kHz and replace it with high passed white noise; few people could discern any difference
I was just thinking about something like that a few days ago while waiting for the bus. I would be very surprised if you couldn't get away with going at least as low as 16 kHz while still fooling the vast majority of people, especially since most adults can't really hear much above that to begin with. Considering how many people are used to mostly listening to crap like the audio ripped from a low-quality YouTube video by one of those conversion sites that recompresses it as an MP3 that then gets burned to a CD that finally gets re-ripped lossily again, all to be played back on their MP3 player with $2 earbuds that they're listening to over the the background noise of heavy traffic (or even worse, on the subway) and have preexisting hearing damage from cranking the volume up to try to drown that out, I could easily believe that you could probably filter out everything as far down as 12-13 kHz and have a sizable number of people not really notice/care. However, I'm too lazy/not quite interested enough to investigate or to test it on anyone.
A lot of people are perfectly happy with disturbingly low-quality audio. I listen to the music just for the music's sake, not the technical accuracy of the reproduction, and I'll put up with some pretty mediocre recordings/encodings of things if that's all that's out there and the music itself is good (e.g. sample tracks on the site of a small band that doesn't have an album out), but at some point it reaches a level where I have to boggle at how people can listen to some things without it grating on their ears. They always manage to prove me wrong when I think an absolute floor has been reached for what they'll put up with before they start complaining, though.