Firstly people haven't 'done this test over and over.'
There's been exactly one serious sort-of peer-reviewed paper in the AES journal, and that paper compared high-res commercially mastered audio sources of possibly questionable parentage with a 44.1/16 downconversion.
It also included SACD, which isn't a fixed bit depth linear PCM technology, and has been justifiably criticised for it.
I'm not aware of any tests that compare raw high-res unprocessed recordings with downsampled content.
Secondly, a fair comparison would be 48/16 and 48/24.
Personally I'm not very sold on high sample rates. I know there are technical reasons why it's easier to make antialiasing filters sound transparent at 96k than it is at 44.1k, and in practice it's not easy to pull apart practical design from theoretical limits. (Nyquist is only ever an ideal. No hardware is ever Nyquist-perfect.)
Basically psychoacoustics is hard. Ears are ridiculously sensitive, brains are occasionally delusional, and marketing people lurk everywhere.
It's extremely difficult to pull apart fact from reality.
But that's no excuse for having a misleadingly superficial understanding of the theory - which the original article does.
There's been exactly one serious sort-of peer-reviewed paper in the AES journal, and that paper compared high-res commercially mastered audio sources of possibly questionable parentage with a 44.1/16 downconversion.
It also included SACD, which isn't a fixed bit depth linear PCM technology, and has been justifiably criticised for it.
I'm not aware of any tests that compare raw high-res unprocessed recordings with downsampled content.
Secondly, a fair comparison would be 48/16 and 48/24.
Personally I'm not very sold on high sample rates. I know there are technical reasons why it's easier to make antialiasing filters sound transparent at 96k than it is at 44.1k, and in practice it's not easy to pull apart practical design from theoretical limits. (Nyquist is only ever an ideal. No hardware is ever Nyquist-perfect.)
Basically psychoacoustics is hard. Ears are ridiculously sensitive, brains are occasionally delusional, and marketing people lurk everywhere.
It's extremely difficult to pull apart fact from reality.
But that's no excuse for having a misleadingly superficial understanding of the theory - which the original article does.