Do we really need anything greater than 24/96? Opinions?

Abraxalito , I agree though my suggestion a few comments back was ignored , lol , regarding Tonian Labs recordings which are by far the most realistic sounding percussion recordings I’ve heard to date ,
Hi-res streaming , DVD audio , HDCD and what have you , ive listened to countless excellent recordings, with some of the very best talked about in audio media and online that come close to Tonian labs 16/44 recordings but so far no equals .
Borrow or buy a copy and listen for yourself.

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

44.1/16 is enough for any stage in the signal chain, even more so at the playback. Some oversampling at the mastering/AD/DA conversion -sure. 24 bit is because of lazy/sloppy engineers. Good recording/mastering is key. The above article by good old Monty still holds. Human ears and the the sampling theorem haven’t evolved over the past couple of years.

Is the Earth flat and in the center of the universe? Opinions?

Going purely based on research evidence, the evidence suggests that Redbook is not sufficient, but 24/96 is: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296
The paper is not perfect (nor the studies it references) and even its justification for 24/96 is quite weak, but with rapidly shrinking storage/bandwidth costs, there is not a lot of reason not to standardize on 24/96.

Somewhere I have a link that showed slightly better timing discrimination in some subjects, with a bandwidth just slightly over 20KHz, but virtually no benefit to going much higher than this. This would also suggest Redbook may not be perfect for everyone, but 24/96 would cover everyone.

You can always take away information at the playback stage if you are worried about distortion at >20KHz.

Indeed there are numerous problems with this AES paper and one of them is raised in the discussion: how can one train for unknown causes? The author’s answer is not convincing to me.
https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/journal/?ID=591
Metaresearch can also be burdened with a publication bias; the positive verifications of a hypothesis are more likely to be published than the negative ones. The author writes "The effect is perhaps small and difficult to detect". In the statistical analysis the bias can easily outweigh such observations. Finally, the microscopical population that can hear slightly above 20khz (most adults cannot above 16kHz) is easily served by the Nyquist limit of 22,05 kHz. Anything higher can exacerbate the ultrasonics intermodulation. If reason ruled, all cars should have a factory speed limit of 70mph. But this would impinge on personal liberties, right? Fortunately, in audiophile audio there is no collateral damage, other than that to the wallet and to the ears of an odd dog.