speakers for 24/96 audio

Al,
Thank you. You brought very important point - quality of the recording engineering (on the top of compression issue that Shadorne mentioned). Average quality is not very high while some of the recordings I have are just incredibly good. Perhaps I'm arguing too much for the best case scenario while average quality of the recording was another reason for me to stay with 16/44 and Benchmark DAC1.

I checked recording as well - not available.

Mapman wrote "you definitely want very good, younger ears"

Oh yes, but where can I get it?

I dunno, Kijanki, I randomly looked at two good power amps in JA's testing, a Moon and a Pass, and they were both had measured s/n ratios of about -84db at 1 watt, which is actually excellent performance. You keep forgetting that most power amps have about 30db of gain. Measuring s/n ratio at full power is sort of cheating for marketing's sake. A speaker with 95db/2.83v/1m efficiency, like my old Legacy Focus, will let you hear the hiss from such an amp rather readily. So I still contend that for listening the amps are the limiting factor, not well implemented 16/44.

As for your comments about Nyquist, it would seem your real thesis is that digital reproduction isn't very good, even with a DAC1. I still wonder, why does it sound so good if you're correct? I'm missing something.

Irvrobinson - I assume that you buy properly sized amp for the speakers and the room. My amp is rated 150W at 6ohm and I am pretty sure I am getting peaks even larger than that (headroom). It corresponds to largest digital number coming from CD - meaning covers full dynamic range. If you listen at 1W then I agree that you have no chance to experience full dynamic range, not only because of the noise floor of the amp but more likely because of the ambient noise and threshold of our hearing.

To test if power amp is limiting factor is very simple - Just turn on power amp, set volume to zero and listen. Can you hear anything? I cannot - dead silent. If I cannot hear anything in very quiet room in my listening position why even bring numbers into discussion?

As for Nyquist - digital reproduction is decent from 16/44 media and, according to reviews, pretty good with SACD. I seriously doubt that they would release 24/192 master tapes to public. What is released right know as high resolution is often the same as 16/44 (I read article about it). SACD is a different story because it cannot be copied (pit width modulation) but it does not work with the server and selection is very limited. I settled at 16/44 for all the reasons I mentioned before but understand its limitations. I adjusted my gear accordingly with very forgiving Hyperion speakers.

. Closer you get to Nyquist frequency the more samples you need to properly reconstruct original waveform - not possible to do for short high frequency sounds.

Not so. The waveform is perfectly reconstructed. The mathematics are quite rigorous. The main issue with digital is

1. Anti alias filtering (higher frequencies must be eliminated prior to ADC or they can fold in)
2. Jitter

Both of the above add spurious non musical signals. Both can be managed