I was chatting with one of our customers on a recent tour of our facilities and he asked if it would be overkill to strive for higher sampling rates and greater bit depth in recordings given the fact current 192kHz 24 bit recordings exceed (by far) the limits of human hearing and analog hardware's ability to reproduce anywhere near the dynamic range possible.
The short answer is no. It would be like suggesting your grandmother needed a bigger faster car to go to the shopping mall just in case she needed it. She doesn't.
But then .... the difference between a lower grade technology like analog recording, or a higher grade technology like DSD all sound significantly better than the current high sample rate and bit depth PCM technologies - some of the time.
Maybe we're looking in the wrong place for what improvements are possible.
The human auditory perception mechanism is a complex model that rarely conforms to textbook solutions that "should" make sense and exceed our ability to hear differences.
It certainly can get better, we have a long way to go, but perhaps the way we get there isn't so clear.
