Yeah, 96kHz/24bit is only really useful for production, since it makes it more foolproof and harder to mess up your recording. But storing music over 48kHz and

Yeah, 96kHz/24bit is only really useful for production, since it makes it more foolproof and harder to mess up your recording. But storing music over 48kHz and 16bit for comsumption is really just waste of storage space and pure snake oil. 16 bit give a dynamic range of 96dB and I'm not aware of any recording outside of experiments that take advantage of it. Even the most expensive speaker / headphones will distort terribly if you play them on the loudness level where this dynamic range would matter... And most "high quality" recordings with a high frequency range (96kHz+) only really add ultrasonic sound and mostly noise artefacts that don't correlate to the music recorded (and that no speaker / headphones can even reasonably, without high distortions, reproduce, if they even pass the LPF of the reproduction chain). So yeah, I also think that 48/16 is all we need for optimal consumption. If the format is lossless, it's also nice for archival reasons.