So, I create both music and photography. And I find it interesting that I've got a very digital music playing and listening setup, whereas I've got a very analog photography setup. And I'm obsessed with quality, either way. But... I don't really find that there's any difference that I can actually hear between uncompressed 44kHz audio and 96+kHz audio. I can hear a huge difference between compressed audio and uncompressed audio. And I know that I don't have golden ears, but my range of hearing goes pretty far up for a person in their thirties, actually. There is, of course, often a change in the way they master for the higher-quality formats. I think I'd be happier with a version that's free of excessive 'loudness' from being mastered to sound loud than a higher-resolution version. After reading your Open Mike, I think I realized the difference. If I go through an exhibition of art photos, I can step up close to the ones that are taken on a 4x5 view camera or a medium format film camera or even one of the really good digital cameras, and I can see that... oh, yeah, there's no pixels. And then I can see something taken on somebody's inexpensive P&S and upsampled at a reasonable viewing size and see how the resolution trails off into blurry pixelization. And.... sometimes, that's really unpleasant, like seeing a model's pores. But for a landscape, that can be really beautiful and reveal new layers to a composition. However, there's no such equivalent for audio. Once you've got a reasonably flat sound system and a room free of distorting resonances and ambient noise, that's it. You can't 'zoom in' aurally.

I'd say boning cousins, but that sounds like something you'd only have in the hollers of Virginia.

No. Especially if you still have your cellphone, 2-way pager, Sprint USB data stick, and MacBook Pro office laptop.

That's funny... I got myself a bass guitar last May. :)