Are high sample rates making your music sound worse?

Just to mention that the figures touted for CD SNR and Dynamic Range of 90 dB or more are strictly theoretical. In practice the ordinary drawbacks of the playback system and room not to mention the *intentional overly aggressive dynamic range compression* that’s fairly rampant in the industry over the past twenty years or so obviously limits those numbers. How much? Answer at 11.

The objectively BEST sample rate for playback ... drum roll please ...

Is the one used in the mastering room

On the approved recording.
There is no gain to moving from there, and with something like MQA that adds distortion, there is a loss in quality.
Having said that as #1 the next factor in listening is your room. Most rooms are not good, and sure we can put $20,000 or $200,000 in gear in a bad room ... but it’s rather silly if you understand the room to be over 50% of the sound from a pair of speakers. And if you doubt that figure, set up the hifi in the garage or basement.

but it’s rather silly if you understand the room to be over 50% of the sound from a pair of speakers. And if you doubt that figure, set up the hifi in the garage or basement.

I would honestly say this is conservative. I've measured rooms, and with +- 20 dB nulls and peaks, a room can have tremendous effects on the output power in the bass, the timber, and the ability to resolve spacial cues.

It is also true that we can train our ears to reduce some of these effects. Try recording a person's voice, or just your stereo in a room, then listen to it with headphones. You'll be amazed. With training, you can teach yourself to stop blocking this, and you suddenly can hear the room itself.

Best,
E

This thread is about high sampling rates as a means to improve AtoD/DtoA because CD sounded crap. Now you can blame the medium, the mastering, the sampling rate or the playback system but not room acoustics. 

@rexp

CD already offers us better quality than we can hear in a room, so that argument doesn’t hold. 
 
I also only skimmed the article, but I didn’t see any mention of ADC/DAC, it’s merely saying your hardware likely can’t handle the higher sampling rate, the Benchmark DAC3 for instance acruslly downsamples 192kHz audio to 110kHz, as the chips used have poorer performance at 192kHz, and not that you’d hear the difference  of 110 vs 192.