> Higher sample rates than 48kHz only needed when you want to pitch down ultrasonic recordings (of whales, bats and other such animals for example).
There are numerous use cases for higher sample rates that go beyond this but it's hard to talk about it without starting flame wars filled with junk science.
Say it or don't but "I have evidence otherwise but don't think I should say" is just as bad a flame war gateway as tempting the junk science audiophiles directly.
Higher sample rates are lower latency for the same block size and resampling is not "free" (pick 2: performance, aliasing, latency) so there can be advantages to working with audio archived at higher sample rates.
But all the advantages come down to professional or editing use cases. There's next to zero advantage to using it as a storage format for listening. Just like 24 bit audio (do you have an amp with 96dB SNR?).
Just personally, I have seen little evidence (personally, professionally, or academically) that there is any advantage for lossless audio for consumer applications. For professional applications there are plenty, and it's endlessly tiring to convince people that "no, actually I need 96kHz for my use case."
Where the audiophiles have _some_ argument here is the design of reconstruction filters which I've heard alleged can perform better in the audible frequency range if the stop band is outside of it. But I have never personally tested this, nor cared enough to. But the theory is sound.
Whether or not it's perceptible depends on what you're measuring, though. In theory, there should be perceptual differences in sound localization if your DAC's reconstruction filter is at 24kHz vs 48kHz since it will change the group delay in a critical frequency region, where you'll get sound at >~2kHz arriving later at the lower sample rate. I think it would be extremely hard to test this though, because humans are really shitty at sound localization to begin with, and practically speaking most recorded material is processed to shit in that frequency range to intentionally decorrelate the channels for the perception of "width."
I know that with oscilloscopes, it’s recommended to use 5x instead of nuquist 2x of the highest frequency you want to use., but the most reasonable argument I’ve heard for higher than 48kHz sampling is digital audio effects.
But for the end result 48kHz is more than necessary. I can’t even hear any frequency above 17kHz.
Yes, bit depth headroom is very useful for audio production to avoid aliasing. Pro DAWs support 96KHz.