I guess the best way to describe what the big deal about sample rate compared to bit depth is this:
Indeed, bit depth will give you better divisions of volume, but what does it matter when you are taking fewer "pictures" of the sound?
I will put it in terms now to illustrate what I am talking about.
A low tone. This sucka takes some time to develope in the time line. That is why it is frequency right?
But really take a good look at a bass wave and you see that the sound is in a linear fashion rising up and falling down in volume. Now, divide up the frequency by the sampling rate. You will see that the "pictures" being taken of the sound are happening at here, here, here here, here...per second. Great. But what about what happened between those pictures, and, what about the volume change between those pictures? Yikes, with lower sampling rates, you have MORE volume change between the samples! The effect this cause on your ears is a sort of distortion to the sound, and in addition, the "realism" of the sound is far less.
Let's face it guys, we don't NEED a full 24 bit resolution to represent almost ALL music productions! Really we don't. But we DO WANT as realistic "picture" of the original sound as possible.
Higher sampling rates don't just benefit the "high frequencies" to my ears. Bass sound a lot richer, and midrange seems to have a lot more detail. Stereo imaging improves dramatically. Things seem to stay in place in the oveall sound much better. There is a richness to the overall tone in higher sampling rates. DSP definately sounds much better.
My experiences with 96KHz sampling rates is that the audio captured that way sound far more realistic, and certainly more "analog like" than lower sampling rates.
I am dead ass tired right now after working sound all night, so I won't go into why audio that is SRC'ed down (sample rate converted) produces better audio than audio that was just captured at a lower SR, but once I do, it will make a lot of sense. Back when SRC's were pretty bad, thus avoided, the laymens advice of avoiding SRC was valid. It is NOT valid anymore as the code for SRC has improved tremendously in the last few years.
And I am still formulating in my mind how to show you all some real life examples of how sample rates will make a bigger difference to your audio that bit depth does. It will happen though.
Keep in mind that the reason software/hardware manufactures don't like to talk about sample rates is because upping sample rates in hardware, and coding for higher sample rates in software is MUCH harder to do that increasing bit depth, and thus, more expensive. It is
the dirty little secret the industry is keeping quiet right now.
Peace.
Ed