A 24-bit sample depth is not completely useless and silly in the way that gold plated HDMI cables are. You can get a real improvement in dynamic range with 24-b

A 24-bit sample depth is not completely useless and silly in the way that gold plated HDMI cables are. You can get a real improvement in dynamic range with 24-bit samples, allowing a song to have quiet parts and loud parts with no loss in quality in either, which is hard to do with 16-bit samples without losing quality for the quiet parts or using dynamic range compression and having everything sound roughly the same. Of course, few people actually want impressive shifts in volume in their music, because prog is dead and no one wants their headphones to suddenly blow their eardrums out. Gotta compress the shit out of that dubstep for the kiddies! Somewhat ironically, greater bit depth in audio makes a bigger difference for film than most music because of this.