Re: Sound
" It's chosen to match the capabilities of the human ear - the complete capabilities of the perfect human ear."
Nahh.. It was chosen partly to match our ears capability, but mostly due to the technical limitations at the time. Using such a small margin between sampling frequency and actual Nyquist cut-off frequency introduced a lot of challenges. 16 bit's for the full +/- swing of a signal isn't that spectacular a resolution. Low level signals will be coded with poor resolution.
One question is why CDs are mastered with such awful "hot" (compressed) sound? Is it a result of the characteristics of CD sound? Or is it just engineers that are sh*t compared to the ones that did LP..