Are high sample rates making your music sound worse?

To paraphase, 'its the source material stoopid'. Even supposedly top mastering studios like Bernie Grundman still churn out crap sounding CD's, its a disgrace really. 

I admit, I did not read all the personal opinions (which they are). I would every second, hour, day and week prefer a well built, state of the art cd/sacd player that does not upsample to DACs market to the  "highest is best" crowd. To paraphrase the old saying, "if the first watt is bad the next 500 will be just as bad". And to quote wikipedia,

"A commonly seen measure of sampling is S/s, which stands for "samples per second". As an example, 1 MS/s is one million samples per second.

When it is necessary to capture audio covering the entire 20–20,000 Hz range of human hearing,[5] such as when recording music or many types of acoustic events, audio waveforms are typically sampled at 44.1 kHz (CD), 48 kHz, 88.2 kHz, or 96 kHz.[6] The approximately double-rate requirement is a consequence of the Nyquist theorem. Sampling rates higher than about 50 kHz to 60 kHz cannot supply more usable information for human listeners. Early professional audio equipment manufacturers chose sampling rates in the region of 50 kHz for this reason.

There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements: such as 96 kHz and even 192 kHz[7] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers. In fact, in some cases, ultrasonic sounds do interact with and modulate the audible part of the frequency spectrum (intermodulation distortion), degrading the fidelity.[8] One advantage of higher sampling rates is that they can relax the low-pass filter design requirements for ADCs and DACs, but with modern oversampling sigma-delta converters this advantage is less important.

The Audio Engineering Society recommends 48 kHz sampling rate for most applications but gives recognition to 44.1 kHz for Compact Disc (CD) and other consumer uses, 32 kHz for transmission-related applications, and 96 kHz for higher bandwidth or relaxed anti-aliasing filtering.[9] Both Lavry Engineering and J. Robert Stuart state that the ideal sampling rate would be about 60 kHz, but since this is not a standard frequency, recommend 88.2 or 96 kHz for recording purposes."

 In other words, higher is not necessarily better from this armchair.

Folks, I don't have time to go into all of it now, but there are LOTS of really serious errors in the statements being made here. e.g. "thinning out the music", e.g.: "you cant hear above 20 kHz so why 192?"  These make really critical mis-assumptions about what is going on in up sampling.
First, go learn about up-sampling and interpolation filters. Then learn about reconstruction filters and their issues. Then think about how much better you make things if you first interpolate and then feed it to the reconstruction filter.  Lots of analog issues get much easier.
It need not change the original data one bit (both literally and figuratively)
Bottom line: this is all about making the job of the end analog filters easier and less likely to produce artifacts. And done right it works terrifically well.  Done wrong, all bets are off. Don't do it wrong :-)

Quote: (partial) "There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements: such as 96 kHz and even 192 kHz[7] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers. "
Comment:    Whoa!  None of this is done to reproduce ultrasonic frequencies. In fact the analog filters remove them as best they can. It is done so that the analog filters can be lower-order and more phase-correct, and/or to allow them to BETTER remove the ultrasonic frequencies (which exist, whether you like it or not in a stepped eave out of a DAC) more completely. Heck, read the app notes from any major DAC provider like TI/Burr Brown and see the noise after their reconstruction filters. not so good you will find. But with proper up sampling, we move the noise higher making it easier to filter.
It is these partial truths that continue the crazy arguments between engineers trying to make better sound and audiophiles that are being a) confused and b) sold stuff that does not sound as good as it otherwise might.
Rant off.