[soundwave106]

This depends on whether you are in the studio or are just playing back things.

In the studio, I would say that 24 bit at least should be the norm for recording purposes.

24 bit recording gives you very noticeable increased headroom (about 20dB). This gives you quite a bit more flexibility recording lower levels without concerning yourself about the noise floor. The difference isn't huge for most prosumer setups in practice, but given that the processing power and storage power of computers makes recording in 24 bit trivial to do, there really is no reason not to record 24 bit these days IMHO.

Sample rate also comes into play, mainly if you have older plugins that do not oversample. Some of the mathematical calculations involved, particularly if they are quickly responding to audio changes (eg limiting / compression, distortion), or are using "naive" aliasing-prone algorithms (eg naive sawtooth wave vs. something like BLEP / PolyBLEP etc.), can introduce frequencies beyond the Nyquist that may translate into aliasing. These days, I would say most plugins do oversample internally or at the very least give you the option to do so. There's also a VST wrapper to over-sample older plugins as well (http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/antialias/). So I do not think recording over 44.1kHz is very necessary these days. I don't discount opinions from people that recording at 192kHz "sounds better", though, given the possibility that they are using plugins that are prone to aliasing at 44.1kHz rates.

I personally do not see any benefit of 16/44.1kHz for playback most recordings. Maybe 24 bit would be useful for heavily dynamic music (one of the few categories where you generally find this is orchestral music), but I'm thinking even for here the 96dB range of 16 bit audio should be enough for most cases.

[nullc]

> This gives you quite a bit more flexibility recording lower levels without concerning yourself about the noise floor.

To be fair, that only applies to the digital part of your signal chain. The analog portion is going to have nowhere near 24 bits of room above the noise floor.

The article is pretty clear that 24/192 can be reasonable for production-- it's just not reasonable for playback.