Let's deal with the loudness wars before we start worrying about 24/96. yeah - the loudness wars need to stop. until big time mastering houses would let some of the original dynamic range from a performance end up on the final product, high samplerate/bit-depth audio won't really matter to the average music consumer, IMHO.
that said, i'm familiar with the nyquist theorem and i know someone will tell me i'm full of shit, but i can definitely hear the difference between 24/96 and 16/441 in my modest studio. i think the problem with 16/441 is not the limitation of the format itself, but how we get there. i've never been able to find a dithering algorithm that preserves the all of the "shimmer" and clarity of 24/96 when it gets down-sampled to 16/441. but i'm usually dealing with non-mastered material that hasn't been compressed all to hell - we're talking raw mixes, so the dynamics issue is still very much on the table.
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that said, i'm familiar with the nyquist theorem and i know someone will tell me i'm full of shit, but i can definitely hear the difference between 24/96 and 16/441 in my modest studio. i think the problem with 16/441 is not the limitation of the format itself, but how we get there. i've never been able to find a dithering algorithm that preserves the all of the "shimmer" and clarity of 24/96 when it gets down-sampled to 16/441. but i'm usually dealing with non-mastered material that hasn't been compressed all to hell - we're talking raw mixes, so the dynamics issue is still very much on the table.