But in all seriousness, why not if its there and its more accurate.
Because it's not really more accurate...at least not in the way that most folks think.
Sample rate is described by the Nyquist theorem which mathematically proves that a *lossless* reproduction of an analog frequency only requires a sample rate of twice that frequency. this means that at a sample rate of 44.1kHz one can losslessly encode/decode a 20kHz signal with some sample room left over (used for other physical considerations).
What this means is that one only need to take two samples for every wave cycle for lossless encoding/decoding. At that frequency, it's not the stairstep you see in most diagrams, because at that "resolution" there just aren't that many samples. But there doesn't need to be. Lossless means 100% accurate.
At a sample rate of 96kHz, one is only increasing the alleged "resolution" for a 20kHz wave from just over 2 samples to just under 5 samples per wave. Not only is that still not enough "resolution" to get a good reconstruction by "connecting the dots", but it doesn't matter because that's not how Nyquist does it.
Remember, more slices (faster sample rate) may increase the "resolution", but only in that the increased resolution means a higher frequency, not a more accurate lower frequency. Just as 44.1 kHz means accurate reproduction of at least 20kHz, a 96kHz sample rate only ensures that the accurate reproduction range is increased to somewhere in the 40kHz range.
Very few, if any, of the folks reading this, including me, can hear anything past 17kHz, and there's plenty of rockers here that have difficulty on anything past 14khz. Since increasing the sample rate above 44.1kHz in an of itself has zero effect on accuracy in the 14-17kHz range, and only extends the range even further above our hearing than 20khz already does, well beyond the range of dog whistles - and well beyond the range of either our gear or our ears to reproduce - and there is no advantage to the faster sample rate. you're only eating up CPU cycles and hard disc space for no reason.
Before anybody comes back and says, "but my stuff sounds better at this rate than at that rate", that may very well be true. But it's NOT because of the actual sample rate itself; it's because of some design flaw or idiosyncrasy in the converter itself that causes different performance level or coloration between frequency settings. And there no guarantee that Frequency A is always going to sound better than frequency B when you move to another converter just because it does on the one your using now; each model of converter can have it's own character.
G.
^oo^
