[nickbatz]

You need more virgins.

I do get the appeal, but I'm more interested in super-freaky women.

But I don't understand why having more samples to describe a sine wave that can only go one direction or the other makes any sense whatsoever.

It's more of a mastering argument. Everything you do to a waveform adds
more bits and usually creates harmonics. 24-bits leaves room for the
bits, and a doubling the sample rate keeps those harmonics that you can
deal with more gracefully if you leave them there until it's time to
bring the project back to a standard format.

Increasing the number of bits, I'm with you (because you're keeping low-level detail).

It's doubling the sample rate that makes no sense to me, unless you believe that - again - super-freqs way above hearing and at a really low level make any difference.

In other words, a 20K sine wave - and of course it's all sine waves - sounds identical sampled at 44.1KHz and at 96kHz - basic sampling theory, as you undoubtedly know.

I work mostly with instrument plug-ins and sample libraries these days, with occasional live overdubs, so it's not practical to sacrifice half my computer horsepower for such a small improvement - especially when the samples are recorded at 44.1 or 48 anyway.

You won't double your computer usage, but you'll increase it some.

Well, I'm thinking about sample-streaming off drives, not so much running processing plug-ins. Doubling the file size halves the number of voices you can stream before bringing your computer to its knees. It also uses twice as much memory for loading samples into the head-start buffer - i.e. you can't have as many instrument articulations loaded and ready to play.

Having said that, SSDs totally changed the game. And my largest template uses less than 40GB of the 64GB in my main machine. Voice count and RAM aren't unlimited resources, but we've come a long way from the days of needing several slave computers to run a sampled orchestra all at once.

I'm
not arguing for 2x or 4x sample rates all the time. I record everything
at 24-bit 44.1 kHz because just about all the recording I do is live, in
the field. The less crap I record, the less I have to worry about what
to get rid of. If you like what you're doing, then just keep doing it.

Sure.

On the rare occasions that I have a paying customer, if he asks for 96
kHz, I just push that button. The customer may not always be right, but
doing what he wants makes getting paid more certain.

Nobody can stand to listen to audio that's recorded at only 96kHz. Your customer should pay double for 192kHz, or why even unpack your mics?