[Mike Rivers]

On Jun 30, 8:49 am, "Dobbin" wrote:

Few pros record 44.1/16bit (store-bought CD) any more

Actually, many pros do (and 48 kHz, too - think film production). It's
the amateurs who scoff at it because they don't buy good equipment.
It's easier to to get better results from a poor 96 kHz 24-bit system
than from a poor 44.1 kHz 16-bit system.

and who would
downsample their masters for archiving (and what about all the multitracks)?

If the original recordings were at a higher rate, then there probably
would be a direct copy for safety. But it would also be a smart idea
to keep a copy in a more universally accepted, standard, and playable
format. It might be playable further into the future than the format
du jour. There are some recommended standards (AES and SPARS) for
storage formats, but sample rate and word length are not part of those
recommendations.

The "literally dozens" of other media is the problem - which one to bet on
for a hundred years time.

Exactly. While the fidelity may not be as good as what went into the
microphone, it's not difficult to play a phonograph disk or an analog
tape no matter the level of technology in the future. But how do you
read that ATA-100 disk drive ten years from now when all computers
have whatever has replaced SATA? And how will you know what RAID
format you have when you get a box of disk drives that supposedly
contain a project? It's bad enough to decipher what people wrote on
tape boxes 40 years ago.