I'm 35, and I can hear the difference in the sound in this case without question. It's not a maybe, its a definitely. 15k isn't out of the range of hearing for most people. Remember, what we hear doesn't have an ON/OFF switch above a certain frequency. There is a roll off, meaning we can still hear it, but at a much lower volume. At the same time I acknowledge at a certain point it is so soft that we essentially can't hear it.
The argument that everything above 15k isn't worth worrying about, I can't say I agree with that, but that's just my opinion
Show an engineer that every layer on their DAW is gonna have that cut and let me know how you go @meta-redundant: Good observation, the weighting of my freq analyzer is set by default to have that slant - it's tuned to pink noise so that a good mix will have a flat curve, but pink noise itself will end up having that upwards slope. Sorry that it's a confusing thing for this test! But I find the relative difference between two cases is still very clear.
@hez: I think that theory is the most likely, a way of anti-aliasing. Kinda strange way to do it if you ask me, I'm pretty sure other digital samplers don't do this, but then again I haven't tested that!
OR maybe it's a freaking amazing high end oldskool modelling of the classic EMU sampler.
