[ssamadhi97]

Well.. the "16kHz cutoff for mp3" thing is sort of a myth which does not even nearly hold true for all encoders and all bitrates.

It is generally "expensive" to store high frequencies, and we can't really hear much of them in "real world" / "real music" situations, so lossy formats in general tend to discard these first to save bits and use them to encode the things we actually CAN hear as good as possible. For most current audio codecs this means the lower the bitrate, the lower the cutoff will be.


Additionally, mp3 has a tendency to cut off at 16kHz most of the time even when there's a decent amount of bitrate available for encoding.

One problem of the mp3 format in general is that it is disproportionately inefficient at encoding signals above 16kHz, this is why any decent mp3 encoder avoids to encode such content as long as possible. Only if there's plenty of bitrate available or the signal is really strong above 16kHz the encoder will preserve these frequencies.


I guess the "mp3 = 16kHz cutoff" is related to the fact that for a long time the lion's share of mp3 files out there was encoded at 128kbps, a bitrate at which most mp3 encoders stop caring about content above 16kHz at all, because preserving any of it would be an insane waste of bits that are much better spent elsewhere (namely on encoding the content below 16kHz as good as possible)