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Studios now are at 96/24, I suspect plenty weren’t at the crossover point from tape. Tape itself has a theoretical fidelity and the real world use of imperfectly set machines and deliberate overloading for effect etc.
I get that CDs were a compromise but there are so many bigger things to worry about before 96/24 and I think above that is into the world of woo - certainly for listening (internal DAW mixing at 32bit fp makes a lot of sense).
Dramatic_Hammer-
Studios have been at 96/24 for a long time. 64bit internal busses are pretty standard for DAWs. Early digital recording used stuff like converted betamax machines (Cowboy Junkies - Trinity Sessions). Donald Fagan - The Nightfly is a good example of early digital, they had tried to record Gaucho digitally but stuck with tape. The Nightfly was 16bit the system had just been updated from 8 bit.
I do understand the way tape works but the compression that any analog recording system can create due to the way it overloads has nothing to do with the bit rate you are using to digitally represent the files.
Tape has a theoretical dynamic range which is far lower than the theoretical dynamic range of a 96/24 recording but again the reason to record at 96/24 is not to increase the dynamic range but to reduce the problems caused by aliasing harmonics appearing in the audible spectrum.
I understand you have a different viewpoint. From my side of things 96/24 is a baseline, it's actually easier to maintain that as a standard throughout my system. I would say that there are many things to worry about before DSD or MQA becomes a thing to worry about but I've been and done worried about the other stuff. Last weekend I was recording a band, 16 tracks of 96/24 to an iPad from my PA mixer, it's not a massive overhead these days.
As far as MP3 etc is concerned there are times when I don't notice the difference and times when I do, the main thing that annoys me is overly compressed music, even if it's 96/24 it will annoy me if there's not enough dynamic range. So in that way we can agree, there are bigger fish to fry.
Airhead
It all helps to muddy the waters! I'm not sure your argument holds much water though.
Analog tape would be the medium until the early eighties, that has a resolution arguably higher than CD. Most digital studios are recording at 96/24 which is the baseline for a definition of hi-res. There are audible advantages over 44/16 (cd quality) as harmonics from the filters used in DACs can affect the audible band at 44/16 but are far less present at 96/24. There are also arguments for using the native clock speed of a DAC. 24 bit also increases the s/n ratio.
192+, DSD, MQA wrappers etc. all make things more complex and may not be an improvement on 96/24 but it's not true to say that most of the 'stuff' is recorded and mixed at a lower resolution.