BC, you wrote:
> I would think high res sampling could be beneficial in a recording situation with excellent acoustics (I'm thinking pro recording session in a studio, concert hall and the like), as opposed to a concert in a noisy bar or ampitheater.
Well, "resolution" isn't really a term with a single, agreed-upon meaning in audio, and here I think that you may be confusing sampling rate with bit depth (the number of active bits per sample). The number of active bits per sample determines the dynamic range capability of a recording system. The best available A/D converters at present have a little over 21 bits of resolution under ideal conditions, so their output data is generally stored in 24-bit samples.
The reality of all live recording--even in a very quiet studio--is that there is always an acoustical "noise floor" and an electrical "noise floor," and there is also a maximum sound pressure level; the dynamic range of the recording is what falls in between these two limits. During the heyday of the vinyl LP a 65 to 70 dB dynamic range was considered outstanding; that is about equivalent to only 11 or 12 bits. The earliest commercially available professional "16-bit" digital audio recording systems had only 14 bits of active data per sample, which already blew any analog tape recorder out of the water, even with advanced noise reduction and high-output tape.
What I'm getting at is that very, very few live recordings fully utilize a 16-bit dynamic range, which is absolutely enormous. When 24-bit recording was introduced, the rationale was that it was strictly for high-end professional use so that a 16-bit range could be maintained throughout a complex studio production, e.g. multi-track mixdown and signal processing, which would all occur at 24 bit resolution until the final mix which would be 16-bit.
That's about as far as the influence of rational, engineering-driven planning went. Everything else after that was the market in action. I can sell my toy better if it has this or that specification which is a "professional" specification--and if it uses 24 bits to convey (say) samples that are really only accurate to 15 bits, then I can still peddle it as a 24-bit recording device, and someone will buy it, take it home and congratulate himself on having it.
People like us use 24-bit recording for security--we can set our record levels a little low, not worry about the peaks, then normalize the levels when we dither down to 16, making ourselves look like level-setting geniuses. And for certain laboratory uses, or systems which drive the loudspeakers to extremely high SPLs, a wider dynamic range can be important. But the range between the noise floor of people's domestic playback environments and the loudest that their playback systems can reproduce is generally quite a bit (so to speak) less than a 16-bit range.
Meanwhile the entire mass market has gone diametrically away from high quality audio in favor of portability. I don't personally limit myself to recording at the audio quality level of an mp3, or the incredibly bad sound of most radio stations, or videos on the Internet, but I do have to notice that about 98% of what people listen to these days is that.