Looks like the link to the article I was mentioning is active again: 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed (xiph.org)
Quote:
192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They’re not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.
Well, no movie I care to watch would be more enjoyable with an addition of HD or surround, but that does not mean that they are useless for everyone.
I’ve seen it. Equipment had slightly improved since 2013, and on mine at least there is no audible degradation even with DXD and higher. Of course there is no other audible difference either when played with no processing, so the only argument is the extra storage space/bandwidth, which is really a non-issue in 2024.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to spend additional effort and resources and take additional precautions for no gain. Also, I haven’t seen proof that it makes a difference with DSP either. If you can give me a practical example where it does, I’ll be more than happy to put it to test.
At least one myth has been cleared up here.
You were very right. In 1982 they were even struggling to get to 16 bits. And still they prefered the digital tape.
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by 192 kHz we’ll be A-OK
AJ
Are we all getting spandex jackets? 
Desert island disc for sure.
You’re still arguing that because something (most likely) does not have any practical effect or value for you, it is not only useless, but should not even exist at all and for everyone. But then, why even listen to music? Carbon footprint of doing that is much greater than whatever incremental difference from using a higher sample rate would be.
Um, what? I think we’re going off the rails here.
(I stopped buying physical media and I don’t upgrade my hardware every time DACs double the supported sampling rate, so in terms of carbon footprint, it just comes down to how green the electricity used is. Unfortunately I can’t control that.)
You seem to be arguing that because higher resolution files are unlikely to sound any better (absent some heavy DSP, where starting with a higher resolution source is always better for processing; actual audible difference of course may or may not be present) they should not exist being a waste of resources. Well, same can be said of listening to music in the first place.
They surely don’t sound any better. Do they look any better?
I’m willing to believe that when given an example of heavy DSP for the purpose of playback. Post-processing is a whole different story. Quote from the article:
Professionals use 24 bit samples in recording and production [14] for headroom, noise floor, and convenience reasons.
16 bits is enough to span the real hearing range with room to spare. It does not span the entire possible signal range of audio equipment. The primary reason to use 24 bits when recording is to prevent mistakes; rather than being careful to center 16 bit recording-- risking clipping if you guess too high and adding noise if you guess too low-- 24 bits allows an operator to set an approximate level and not worry too much about it. Missing the optimal gain setting by a few bits has no consequences, and effects that dynamically compress the recorded range have a deep floor to work with.
An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering. Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations. The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there’s no reason to keep more than 16 bits.
And create a resolution war, just in case.
I disagree. That’s purely argumentative.
Not any worse either.
How is mastering different from PEQ/DRC/Headroom adjustments done locally here?
I’d rather have a resolution war, which does not hurt anyone, then a loudness war that results in horrid recording regardless of resolution.
I also disagree 
I think listening to music (rather than evaluating equipment, where some things do make a difference, some do not, and some make a difference but it is inaudible) is an emotional rather than a practical exercise, and bringing energy efficiency into it (such as it is) strikes me as something belonging in a completely different discussion (maybe “should we listen to music while the world burns?”)
I’ll re-quote from the article for your convenience:
Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations.
PEQ and DRC are frequency-domain effects that boost or attenuate both the signal and the noise at the same rate. Headroom is just gain, so again, it doesn’t change SNR. None can be called “heavy” DSP. If you do heavy, you get serious clipping, regardless of resolution.
I’ve made my case. I’ll wait for a concrete example.
Is it a myth that the different upsampling filters in HQP have an effect on the sound?
I don’t know what kind of up-sampling filters there are in HQP, but they can affect the sound, i.e. if they fall off too early or leak aliasing products into the audible band. The ideal interpolation filter is a fast (“brick-wall”) linear phase filter that has unity gain up to 20kHz and high attenuation (say 120dB or more) at 22.05kHz and beyond. That’s what I stick with. If you want some coloration to the sound, I would think that’s best done using PEQ, before up-sampling.
I believe the HQP closed-form-M filter has double that amount of attenuation.
Double as in 126dB or 240dB? That’s of course better theoretically, but I don’t think such a small difference would be audible - if it’s still linear phase.
(I’ll leave it at that. I don’t want to get into a debate about HQP. It seems people are a lot more passionate about it than audiophile switches or hi-res.)
Oh, don’t worry, I’m not trying to debate. As I use a NOS dac, the upsampling filters do sound quite different to me. Maybe they are subtle in reality but…
There’s more to DSP that can be done than just those.
In any case, this probably ran the entire reasonable course… I still think that one should not apply purely pragmatic reasoning (with a side of IMHO irrelevant argument about resources) to what is at heart an emotional undertaking.
That is also how I think about it. Otherwise we would never have gotten any further than “hifi”.(DIN 45500).
Who knows how real recorded music will sound in our homes in 100 years? We will never know.
When too many end users say that this and that sounds better, it is up to the scientist to figure out why. Even if it is all imagination, how can that be used to create better suggestion of the orchestra being there or you being in the concert hall.