Spogg wrote:resolution at low frequencies
This is the realm, where analog is superior to digital. Finite systems like our modern day AD/DA chips are reconstructing the gaps between two samples very good. But it is still reconstruction. Not the original data.
That's why I always laugh inside, when someone swears on analog gear, but then records it digitally.
However, Infrasound has properties, that go beyond hearing. For decades of decades, scientists thought, elephants would communicate producing infrasound with their body and listening to it with their big ears. It is only a few years now, that it was discovered (by observing two groups that lived several hundreds of kilometers apart), elephants have special receptors in their soles! They stomp on the ground, and the signals created this way are recieved hundreds of kilometers apart over their feet, recognizing the infrasound oscillations of the ground. Something that wouldn't be possible with sound within human range.
And so, when this one group discovered a water source, the leading mother informed the other group, which immediately changed course and they met 3 days later.
But the topc is pitch perception, you say? Yes, and I want to point out, that the stomping indicates that they do not percieve specific frequencies over their feet, but rather non-pitched sound, just like humans used drums to communicate over larger distances.
Because elephants do have the ability to percieve pitches. There's a famous guy who plays piano for elephants, and they come and stay for the whole performace, visibly enjoying it.
And to come back to my opening statement: at 1 Hz an infrasound wave has a length of 340m. It is not affected by any material, only distance makes the singal weaker. The resolution it would need to accurately record a 340m wavelength is not yet invented. But at such low movement, reconstruction algorithm fail and will create amplitude, where no amplitude exists or silence, where no silence exists.
Even with highly sensitive analog gauges, we can detect ultra-low infrasound only down to 5 Hz, and only if its amplitude is higher than 20 dB. Below 5 Hz, only with specific microbarometers as were invented to detect nuclear weapons tests.