<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nitrogen</author><text>In line with what others have mentioned, there are more uses for &amp;quot;sound&amp;quot; cards than just human ears.  Maybe a musician wants to record some ultrasonic insect noise and slow it down to get a unique effect, or a scientist is working with non-human animals with ultrasonic hearing, or a digital restorer is using upper harmonics of noise on a recording to detect the original recording speed (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Live_Wire:_Woody_Guthrie_in_Performance_1949&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Live_Wire:_Woody_Guthrie...&lt;/a&gt;).</text><parent_chain><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>&amp;gt; but it seems that there is some use for rates as high as 384 kHz&lt;p&gt;Nyquist would suggest otherwise but why let pesky math get in the way of the golden ears. This is just more MHz war, DECT 6.0 style BS. I&amp;#x27;m holding out for the dulcet tones of 1Mhz PCM audio myself.</text></item><item><author>amluto</author><text>&amp;gt; PulseAudio has traditionally limited the maximum sample rate to 192 kHz, but it seems that there is some use for rates as high as 384 kHz, so the hard limit has been increased.&lt;p&gt;I can think of a use: plug a long wire into an audio out port and use it to transmit very-low-power AM radio without even needing a mixer.  384 kHz is enough to cover a decent chunk of the AM radio band :)&lt;p&gt;Of course, I bet your average &amp;quot;384 kHz&amp;quot; soundcard does some &amp;quot;direct stream digital&amp;quot; or similar garbage and has a truly atrocious SNR that those frequencies, so this might not actually work.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Brain fart.  384 kilosamples per second is too low for normal AM radio unless there&amp;#x27;s a nonlinearity you can exploit.  It would still be a fun experiment, though.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>PulseAudio 9.0 released</title><url>https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/9.0/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>amluto</author><text>It wouldn&amp;#x27;t surprise me if the hardware BOM cost of supporting these high sample rates for playback is basically zero.  Any decent audio DAC will oversample internally, so if you don&amp;#x27;t actually care about fidelity at inaudibly high frequencies, you can just oversample to the same frequency but shove more bits in.  Of course, if you do this, you ought to do your oversampling carefully to avoid sounding &lt;i&gt;worse&lt;/i&gt; due to leading harmonics of your actual audible signal through your filters into your amp and tweeter.&lt;p&gt;If you use a bona fide 1-bit DAC, you can sample pretty much as fast as you want if all you care about is your pretty spec sheet.  2+MHz sampling?  No problem!&lt;p&gt;The classic article is here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xiph.org&amp;#x2F;~xiphmont&amp;#x2F;demo&amp;#x2F;neil-young.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xiph.org&amp;#x2F;~xiphmont&amp;#x2F;demo&amp;#x2F;neil-young.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Count me out, of course, but I still think it would be amusing to find a &amp;quot;384 kHz&amp;quot; audio DAC that actually worked at high enough frequencies to transmit AM radio.  You&amp;#x27;d have to actively exploit insufficiently filtered harmonics to have a chance.</text><parent_chain><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>&amp;gt; but it seems that there is some use for rates as high as 384 kHz&lt;p&gt;Nyquist would suggest otherwise but why let pesky math get in the way of the golden ears. This is just more MHz war, DECT 6.0 style BS. I&amp;#x27;m holding out for the dulcet tones of 1Mhz PCM audio myself.</text></item><item><author>amluto</author><text>&amp;gt; PulseAudio has traditionally limited the maximum sample rate to 192 kHz, but it seems that there is some use for rates as high as 384 kHz, so the hard limit has been increased.&lt;p&gt;I can think of a use: plug a long wire into an audio out port and use it to transmit very-low-power AM radio without even needing a mixer.  384 kHz is enough to cover a decent chunk of the AM radio band :)&lt;p&gt;Of course, I bet your average &amp;quot;384 kHz&amp;quot; soundcard does some &amp;quot;direct stream digital&amp;quot; or similar garbage and has a truly atrocious SNR that those frequencies, so this might not actually work.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Brain fart.  384 kilosamples per second is too low for normal AM radio unless there&amp;#x27;s a nonlinearity you can exploit.  It would still be a fun experiment, though.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>PulseAudio 9.0 released</title><url>https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/9.0/</url></story>