Also beluga whales can hear past 100,000 hz.  Why limit one's market?  Who knows what the future holds!   (And some scientists may need to record at high sample rates for testing with them!)
Also, it is conceivable that the high harmonics may affect sound in the hearing range or may even affect us subliminally.
As I said, I just do not see a stopping point of a sampling rate that lasts for thousands of years.  It just goes against human nature.
However, Drew made a lot of good points.  But will we really stop at a certain rate?  I doubt it, notwithstanding the scientific arguments.  In fact, it appears that we are already using sample rates that go against the scientific logic.

Jeff Evans
Good points there Drew but what if there are frequencies above 22 kHz.

If you think frequencies > 22 kHz are of value to you, then you choose an appropriate sample rate.
 
Several years ago I could hear a LOUD 17kHz sine wave. Now, I'm guessing not so much.
 
YMMV.

Jeff Evans
I don't think the industry is going to start hassling us for 192KHz masters anytime soon.

 
Always the optimist  
 
Actually in this thread Milton said that some orchestras insist on recording at 192 or even 384 kHz, and higher sample rate recordings are already being offered. We also have to take into account that the record industry is desperate to find something to increase revenue, and will want to be able to sell/hype re-done versions of recordings in a higher-resolution format.
 
Of course, the joke will be if these higher-resolution formats are remasters of existing material without the insane amounts of compression. Then people will listen to the re-mastered versions and say "Wow, this hi-res stuff sounds sooo much better!"

John T
There is a fairly cogent argument for using higher than 44.1 for recording, but it's got nothing to do with capturing higher frequencies. It's that it's easier to build the cutoff filter when there's a bit more bandwidth to play with. Not I just say easier, which you can read as "cheaper". There are many filters that work perfectly well in 44.1.
 

Yes.  Cheaper converters may sound better at higher sample rates because the requirements of the anti-aliasing filters are not as critical at higher sample rates for the reason you point out.  A high quality converter may sound just as good at 44.1 because the anti-aliasing filter is doing it's job well, even when the cut off frequency is very close to the highest frequencies we want to capture.  So i opted for a good converters (Lavry blue series).
 
I am intrigued though by the idea that higher sample rate oversampling in plugins makes for better sound across the spectrum.  Do X3 Pro Channel effects oversample?

One thing I would love to see is that we no longer use terms like "High Quality" or "High Definition". They have no meaning when applied to audio.  Even Hi Fi has lost its original meaning if in fact it ever had one. . 
 
We even misapply the term Stereo.  
 
 

Some VERY interesting comments at the bottom of this interesting article:
http://productionadvice.co.uk/high-sample-rates-make-your-music-sound-worse/
 
Did someone mention headroom? Sorry if I can't read thru 4 pages of stuff but I remember reading in an earlier thread about higher rates being good for more head room when recording/mixing more than actual sound quality. Then the final cut can be lowered while retaining the added quality created by the extra headroom.
 
Or am I out standing in left field somewhere?
 
It should hold true that anything is only as good as the weakest link. If the playback device can't handle 96kHz then the resulting sound could be worse than you'd expect.
 
 
 

Higher sample rates have nothing to do with headroom whatsoever.  Whilst in a floating point digital domain, one has virtually infinite headroom due to the range of values which can be represented in floating point.
 
Oversampling in the DAC's interpolation filter gives better SNR, and greater bit depths give better dynamic range which also relates to (lower) noise floor levels.  Sampling rates only change the frequency range which can be sampled and reproduced.

thanks for the video!  I learned something from it! 

Something else to consider with higher sampling rates, I didn't see in this thread (or overlooked): Accurate clocking. The higher the sample rates, the more accurate your clocking needs to be, since jitter and component issues may become more of a problem. This is why you see these oven-baked atomic clocks offered up from Antelope, for example.
 
If you're sampling at 192Khz with a low-quality clock, you may stand to benefit from halving the sampling rate and improving transient materials, for example. It could be a noticeable improvement.

ston
Higher sample rates have nothing to do with headroom whatsoever.  Whilst in a floating point digital domain, one has virtually infinite headroom due to the range of values which can be represented in floating point.
 

Yes, but....
 
D/A convertors are strictly integer devices and can overflow.
 
It may be that, once inside a DAW with a floating point representation, you can get away with murder concerning levels, if it's clipped coming in from a convertor, it's still clipped. You now have a perfectly accurate floating point representation of a integer clipped signal.
 
Having extra bits at the integer sampling stage makes a huge difference in available dynamic range and s/n - no matter how it's represented later on (i.e. floating point) garbage in - garbage out.