Focus on 24/192 Misguided?.....

I agree with the comments above that embrace the view that the biggest problem is engineering and mastering. I've posted a number of "heads-up" comments in other threads when I came across a particulary good sounding red book CD. Same goes for vinyl. This is an industry problem and my concern is that the music industry will go after market share and demographics. Let's face it folks, the kids love those ear bud thingys and could care less about real music fidelity. Us "gray hairs" are a shrinking market niche. What's an audiophile to do??

yes, I seem to concur that 24/192 makes no sense. I never was a believer of the hi-rez scam that pervades the industry.
There is also a nice article written by Dan Lavry on Lavry Engineering's website on why sampling upto a max of 24/96 makes sense & anything beyond that is bogus. Dan Lavry wrote this article back in 2004! This article is called "Sampling Theory" when you go to this link:
http://www.lavryengineering.com/index_html.html

Insert a quantity of "$" in the space between "1" and "0" and adjust until it sounds good to you.

Also agree with the above, there is only so much on a recording, mastering is where it's at.

My Dac is a custom built NOS AD1865K 16/44 with short signal paths, silver internal wiring and V-CAP OIMP output caps fed by a modded CEC transport, if there's anything missing it's the recording.

I have some (not all) quality redbooks that equal and beat some of my friend's LP counterparts from his Walker T.T. and we compare all the time.

This is a good thread so far.

Poorly recorded and mastered music doesn't sound good at any sample/bit rate. Is that really surprising?

The referenced article is nonsense. Essentially he's saying the math is perfect and therefore nothing else is needed for better sound quality. Sony/Philips said the same thing back in the mid-1980s. Out of bandwidth induced noise is a problem in both digital and analog. It is something engineers are well aware and there are a multitude of solutions with proven track records. If an audio amplifier manufacturer said his new amp filtered out all audio above 20kHz would you consider it a serious high end oriented design? If you really take the article seriously we should all be using 32kHz/12bit digital because the math works perfectly at that level too.