Yeah, my brother worked in a fairly antiquated recording studio about 10 years ago, and they had 24-bit 96kHz ADCs right next to the microphones, with digital l

Yeah, my brother worked in a fairly antiquated recording studio about 10 years ago, and they had 24-bit 96kHz ADCs right next to the microphones, with digital lines carrying the sound data to be recorded onto a computer. All sound processing was performed in this format, with the final mix then being down-sampled to CD format. This is like when people complain that FM always sounds so much better than the newfangled digital radio, without realising that the station signal was transferred to the transmission stations in digital form, often at lower bit-rate than the newfangled digital radio. People like the nice familiar sound of low quality audio. Lots of audio equipment deliberately adulterates the sound to "make it sound better".