You may scoff, but there may be more going on than pure nostalgia for those of us who love our analog recordings and find them more satisfying, in some regards, than CDs.

The following appeared in the letter to the Editor section of Stereophile Volume 23, No 8 August 2000

"High-frequency perception
Editor:
There has been a lot of debate about the importance of high-frequency harmonics in the appreciation of music. A new report, just published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, provides some interesting hard data on this matter ("Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Affect," Oohashi et al, J. Neurophysiol. 2000 83: 3548-3558. An abstract of the article can be viewed at this site )

Briefly, the experimenters utilized a form of music that naturally contained large quantities of high-frequency harmonics. They filtered the sound at 22kHz (the cut off frequency of CDs) to provide two parts: a low frequency and high-frequency component. While the high frequency component remained inaudible and produced no EEG patterns on its own, they did find significant changes in both the listeners' alpha-wave EEG patterns and in their cerebral blood flow when comparing presentations of the full range with that low-pass filtered at 22kHz.

It would seem that those who claim scientific basis for their insistence on the irrelevance of high frequency sound need to modify their arguments quite substantially in light of these results.
Charles King MD, PhD"

It is interesting to note, that the microscopic grooves in a vinyl disc, can resolve information at a level which exceeds the smallest wavelength of visible light. Therefore you should hang on to your BVDs (black vinyl discs)