Yeah, Dunn is an interesting character. These are good papers, and they have a lot of meaning to the high-end audiophile population. However, for us hobbyist type recordists, how much of that is really applicable?
I think we all have to try it out with our rigs, and see if the bang for the buck is there. I've already done this in my room with a very quality-concious audience, and concluded that for the type of music I've working with, and with the current run of commercially-available hardware I own, it is *not*. For me, the bus stops at 48kHz- even though all my gear can go to 96.
It seems that a goodly number of pro studio purchasing people also agree (not that that really matters here). In that previous thread,
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=21183 , Tom Cram of dbx commented that the professional market is being very slow to pick up on the 96kHz option in their high-end pro gear. The demand just isn't there. As pglewis points out, it may be some day- but it isn't, yet.
I've been recording with very good oversampling converters and using 48kHz. I personally *can* hear the difference between 44.1 and 48. I just flat cannot hear the difference between 48 and 96, and the additional storage costs double for the doubled sample rate. In my experience, the bit depth is more important than the sampling rate with currently available hardware- so I'll stay with 24bit/48kHz for my room, and downsample to 16/44.1 only at the last possible minute just before going to CD.
However, your mileage certainly may vary. As it turns out, all my gear uses the AK53xx-family oversampling converters, and they seem to do the job very well. If your gear uses different converters that have different implementations of their internal digital decimation filters, *you may very well* be able to hear enough of a difference going to 96 to make it worth your while- that's Dunn's assertion in his paper, as well. Hell, you might very well be able to listen on my rig and hear that much difference! Everybody knows that I'm old and going deaf...
Bottom line: All that matters is what *your* ears hear on your rig in your room, and the buzzwords just don't freakin' matter- especially if, as a hobbyist, you aren't using the buzzwords to inflate the numbers on your ratecard (;-).
Give me Dunn over Marsh and Jung any day. At least Dunn does decent research, and doesn't just fall back on the "I can hear it, and I don't have to measure it!" arguments... But don't get me started on audiophiles: you know how I get. You can do the search on "skippy" and "audiophile" if you want to see that stuff (;-).