http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/23/apple-and-other-music-retailers-purportedly-looking-at-24-bit-h/ Another one from the "higher numbers must be better" desk. So much rubbish around this move. How about first, Apple start offering ALAC/FLAC lossless and second a quality MP3 encoder such as LAME. Given that very, very few people with high end equipment can tell the difference between CD/FLAC/ALAC and LAME 192 VBR, offering a pro quality 24 bit-96KHz version is completely pointless. This is also why DVD audio purely for music quality is pointless. It makes perfect sense to make primary recordings in 24-96 and to retain that quality as long as possible but by the time you get to final production and mastering, CD 16-44.1 is good enough. Then we have the problem that iPods are simply no longer big enough with enough storage space. There are those of us with 160Gb iPods with the majority of the music in 192kB Mp3 who've run out of space. These files are approximately 10% of the CD WAV. FLAC/ALAC is about 50%. 320 MP3s are about 20%. If we switch to 24-96 files sizes will grow dramatically, even more so because they'll have to stay in lossless to have even the faintest hope of hearing a difference. Then there's the question of the production philosophy. What is the producer and recording engineer going to do with that potential extra quality? When at the moment they're totally focussed on compressing the hell out of everything in the loudness wars. I've watched MP3s on the net go from low quality 128 to uberrip 192 VBR. Now there's a stupid belief that everything has to be "320 or GTFO". Selling 24-96 is just escalation in this stupid game. Ultimately it's just one more attempt by the music biz (which now includes Apple) to persuade gullible people to buy all their old music again.