> No, no one even has the biological ability to. 44100khz, 16-bit audio can perfectly reproduce audio as far as we can physically tell. The only reason to store anything higher is for production or archiving (that is, for computers to listen to).
I'm not an expert, but one claim I saw somewhere is that a higher bit width and sample rate is good for people who are mixing and doing audio processing, even where the final result might get downsampled to 44100 hz and 16 bits per sample at the last stage.
24 fixed bit and 32 variable/ floating bit rate masters have more head room that may avoid clipping but doesn’t guarantee that. 48 or 96 kHz is useful for time stretching and maintaining fidelity (maybe other post processing without aliasing).
That is all intermediate formats and doesn’t really say anything about what is best for consumers like the standard mastered cd quality at 16 bit 44.1 khz.
Bandcamp is a cool market because I can download wavs from albums to store on my phone. You can see what people use as masters and its all over the place. There are many 96khz masters around and 24 bit depth is popular.
I have a usb audio IO that supports 192KHz across 8xin+out. Those file’s just clog up hard drives so I figure 96 is good enough for bat music.
Also, I’ll note that I think the amp and speakers are far more contributing than the master file format. And the quality of the master and mix and tracking even moreso.
I’ll run youtube rips of dj sets through some light hardware compressors and preamps and it sounds great. You cannot have specs determine quality.
I'm not an expert, but one claim I saw somewhere is that a higher bit width and sample rate is good for people who are mixing and doing audio processing, even where the final result might get downsampled to 44100 hz and 16 bits per sample at the last stage.