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

Well written, interesting, provacitive. This coincides with my recent experience with forays into SACD & DVD-A. The overriding contribution to good sound (IMHO)is what I would call the production values( the care and equipment used in recordng & mastering). I have some dual sided DAD(24/96 PCM) and DVD-A (24/192 MLP) discs. I hear no advantage to the 192 sides. I consider the DADs proposed by Halverson & Classic Records to have been an ideal solution to improving the 16/44.1 standard, but of course it was never supported by the big players because it did not afford copy protection. I also find it very difficult to identify before purchasing "true" high def material actually encoded with 24/96 PCM, DSD, or even high speed analog tape with digital remastering. It seems to me these "high def" discs do offer improved sound, but only with the proviso cited in this article that the production values are also high def.

The article seems right, as far as the author goes. He admits to the problem of brick wall filters on Redbook CD, but he forgets to mention timing errors. This is why a cirrectly clocked computer regenerated waveform seems to improve on the CD, thru the same DAC. I would propose a much reduced timing error as part of the improvement of the higher res sampling frequenies. There is also a lot of talk on WAV beng better than FLAC (even though "bits are bits").
Stretching, I would hypothesize that the regeneration of the waveform by the additional complication of the FLAC decompression "bothers" our sensibilities in some way. IF so, then I would also propose that the decompression of MLP on a DVD-A might be similar.
My hypothetical ranking of sound which seems to agree with what I hear is:
CD<=FLAC<=WAV (for 16/44.1)<=24/96MLP<=24/96PCM<=24/192MLP (for DVD/A <= DSD, and just for fun <= LP. At some points the minor improvements may not be worth the additional storage requirements.
Remember, just speculating!