The extra bits mean you can change how you filter the sound later, depending on what range your headphones/speakers are capable of reproducing without distortion, or what your ears are capable of hearing.

Who knows, maybe technology or genetic changes will allow future humans to hear in a wider range than we do now. Those people might appreciate being able to hear what our music really sounded like.

As an engineer, those extra samples are never wasted, and as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space." Drive space is meaningless at this point. When I buy a piece of audio, give me the highest quality available and I will make my own decisions regarding the frequency I want to listen to it at. The reasons behind not giving the user the highest quality possible all sound like a misguided excuse to prevent piracy.

Ok... but the point stands that the signal will be the same if you low-pass filter it no matter how many samples you take. You might as well distribute the file at 44.1 kHz and then interpolate to something higher yourself, if you want to play with it later.

> as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space."

In general, bandwidth is more of a concern than disk space. Most media people consume is never stored on the local device.

So 192/1024? 1024/4M? 1G/1T? Like is there a practical limit for you when you say "highest quality possible"?

I see no issue with storing 24/192 multichannel audio like what comes on blu-ray audio discs, or DSD streams. For my current hard drive situation, I could store 5 GB per song and easily have enough space to have a very large catalog. But drive space is only getting cheaper.