Comment by juiceandjuice

Recording music is supposed to be a snapshot (with room for interpretation) of the composition at play.

Trying to record an edge case like this is the same as recording in a room with bad acoustics. So you end up with some weird (but not faithful) representation of the sound which is a snapshot of the microphone's characteristics and directionality of the ultrasonic tones. It's not reasonable to assume any microphone will behave exactly like a human ear. Even if you could, you're going to have to mimic the tiny random movements a normal person would make listening to a sound, movements which would definitely impact the perception of the sound, because microphones are much more stationary than any human would be.

The "different sounding" argument two posts above is silly, because sound is almost never that monochromatic, and if it is, it's usually boring. Also I don't understand how missing out on an odd order harmonic would be a bad thing :) The reality is none of these arguments are based in a reality of what people would hear, and because of that, the arguments aren't practical.

In reality, 20 bits at 48kHz (or 64kHz) would be more than acceptable for even the most discerning of ears and probably the most practical in terms of space and fidelity, but it'd be a weird format to distribute in.