[mfarris]

You're getting two entirely different things mixed up.

192 kHz is the sample rate. 192,000 slices per second. It does not refer to the audible sound spectrum.

20 kHz in speakers refers to the cycles per second of the audible waveform. Normal human hearing rage is 20 hz - 20 kHz. For most people, it's less than that.

A speaker can certainly play back music sampled 192,000 times per second. Most of them can't play tones that are higher pitched than 20 kHz, which is fine because mostly only dogs can hear up there anyway.

[blackhole]

I am not getting these things mixed up, because the sample rate is related to the maximum frequency that can be stored, and lo and behold, look at all these people claiming that those higher frequencies matter. 44.1 kHz sample rate can only encode tones up to about 22 kHz, whereas 192 can encode frequencies of up to 81 kHz, and those people up there are arguing that these higher frequencies are exactly why 192 kHz is superior. Now, if you want to say that sampling a tone at 44100 times per second somehow won't sound as good than 192000 times per second, I'm not saying that isn't possible, but I don't really take that claim seriously at all.

The fact is, simply distributing music in lossless format carries the vast majority of audible improvements. Arguing over whether or not its 24-bit or 16-bit or making a chunk of sound last 5.2 microseconds instead of 22.67 seems incredibly stupid to me, because you're better off simply improving the mix itself then fiddling over such microscopic differences. These things only become relevant if your mix and performance and recording equipment (or synths) are absurdly close to perfection. This becomes even LESS relevant in an age of indie-musicians.