I have nothing against hirez but feel you will be better off with more channels than more bandwidth. See Tomlinson Hilman (THX) comments here:
I would like to point out in Holman's book titled "Surround Sound: Up and Running", he includes a graphical time-line to put Surround sound into historical perspective. This time-line shows the introduction of 10.2 as early as 1996, before the DVD. As Audyssey points out on their website, there are three basic requirements we need to meet in order to attain realistic reproduction of sound.
- Frequency response
- Dynamic Range
- Accurate Spatial Rendering
These three items correlate well with Holman's answer to the question; "What determines the bit rate needed for audio on media?"
- Frequency range
- Dynamic range
- Number of channels
As Mr Holman is quick to point out, any audio engineer confronted with the question, “what do you want to do with a higher bitrate?”; will always ask for more frequency range and more dynamic range because they don't know what to do with more channels. "It's a new paradigm." "Just to go to 192 KHz sampling rate to satisfy passing bats instead of human beings is pretty crazy, but adding channels is of very great value." (For those readers not terribly familiar with flying rodents, bats have an ability to hear ultrasonic frequencies, the kind you can reproduce with a 192 KHz sampling rate).