Recently, the recording industry (and in particular Universal Music) have announced the joyous news that you are now able to get “High Fidelity Pure Audio” format (that’s an audio Blu-Ray disc to you and me, only playable in Blu-Ray players), supposedly in up to 192kHz/24-bit audio which, it is claimed, will sound vastly superior to the 44.1kHz/16-bit audio CD which has been around for 30-odd years already.

Apart from perhaps the ability to release multichannel recordings on a physical disc without Dolby Surround encoding it (which could be done with, amongst other things, the FLAC file format anyway), what is the point of using such a high sample rate?  Have they not read http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html yet?