.. thought so; newbe!
.. Recording Studios use 2" perforated reel to reels which move at 30" to 60 " per second to kill background wow & flutter plus hiss is no longer an issue which was common knowledge to anyone in the Music Business up until a few years ago. The overall response was 2hz - 70khz at 32 channels with a depth of 160dbs. Larger studios ran at 3" which didn't really matter at that time because DBX was now helping to make background noise a thing of the past plus it helped improve the high end frequencies by encoding the bells shimmers - previously only heard inside the studio itself.
.. When CD's were introduced, the first thing everyone noticed was how FLAT and LIFELESS the recordings were; they were right - the shimmer and subtle vibrations were all but erased from the CD itself. CD's had a limitation of sixty DBs which was masked by the first fifty DBs being understood as a threshold .. artist's were not buying this theory back then .. we still don't buy that theory today. however, the tone-def number-crunchers kept people off balance long enough for CD's to become popular and make 44.1k a standard.
.. The advantage of Reel to Reels, Cassette and LP's were their ability to hide signals like "Quad Stereo" and "Stereo Quad" plus "FM carriers for CD-4" in those tapes and on those records. CD's came along and didn't have the bandwidth to hold those carriers. 48k was tryed and it failed. 88.2k would allow "SQ" to respond again and 92k allowed "QS" and "DBX" to be down-mixxed to 68K signals once more.
.. Digitally, 48k sampling rates just do not hold enough frequency response to be useful in the Music industry. Yamaha came out with a standard that the Digital world totally overlooked called VQF .. but you already know about its devide in threes' pattern don't you.
.. Once again I ask the question of, "Where Are These 96k Encoders" on the internet; if they make them then where are they, if not we'll have to program them.
.. I'm sure that LAME has a 96k sample rate joint stereo encoders somewhere; all I'm asking is "where are they hiding it at" ??
.. If such a beast has not been made; then make the bloody thing already - quit screwing around like BOB the BIAS here and get crack'n.
~fin~
