Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

[Joe Hone]

I worked for 14 years producing albums and visiting various highly regarded major studios in and around Los Angeles. What I found intriguing was the $.29 cent Radio Shack cables being used to connect many of the mixing board components (patch between talkback amp and speakers, preamp and eq, or compressor, or . . .) to each other. Then I would fall into the world of audiophiles and read about $40,000 for a single channel of preamp or amplifier. So, the rich audiophile was spending tens of thousands of dollars to playback the sound produced by $.29 cent cables. Unreal. 

[Campaigner8]

I agree more than half of all albums are slapped together as inexpensively as possible. I have been in the music industry in Canada, seeing both the good and the bad.
So bad that the sound engineer and person who mastered the album was 70% deaf. As a result, he would crank the volume into the red and the bass as thumpy
as a thousand bass guitarists playing simultaneously. The album was so poorly recorded that it made my $14,000 B & W speakers clip.

I switched recording companies, and they were precisely the opposite. They had almost $400,000 of recording equipment in their studio. Their interconnects were over $600 each. Their albums made my semi-high-end system sing. I've spent only $34,000 on my entire system. Unless you are worth a literal fortune, trust me when I say that my system would satisfy 97% of all people. In my experience, the 24 bit/192 kHz high-resolution downloads sound a world better than a CD, for example. I listen to a lot of jazz from 1940 to 1970. That is when music was all analog and recorded correctly. That is my experience anyway.