Comment by rdtsc

There is a perversion going on both ends here. And by perversion I mean a distortion of truth in a bid to make a profit. This is not the worst that can happen, but is just worth mentioning. You probably put more mildly, but I am bit more harsh. Some people are irrational and spend money of stuff that they don't need and another group of people are perpetuating the lies and the marketing in an effort to extract the maximum amount of money from the other group (In other words your basic market setup).

Audiophiles are quite a fascinating group. These are people that can be rather rational in some respects (they could be doing research in some lab somewhere) but when it comes to audio equipment they will shell $2000 for HDMI cables. The salesmen and manufacturers that make these things ("high end" HDMI cables, 192kHz recordings) know this very well and they aggregate around this target set of clients.

I think that is exactly what is happening here. At some point storage capacity is just good enough and one can distribute 48kHz, 16bit audio to everyone. But what do you do next? Everyone is getting that and it is not new and cool anymore. What to do? Well increase the frequency and sell everyone a newer, better, higher fidelity thing, even though objectively human years cannot really hear the difference. Subjectively though, there is a huge difference. If you ask someone who just spent $50 for a 192kHz record if they like it better than say a $20 48kHz one, I bet you 100% of people will confirm that 192kHz sounds better and will be ready to go and buy more.