Finally, it's getting normal for studios to release material at 24 bit depth. 24 bits of accuracy slightly exceeds the tolerance of capacitors, which all of your gear requires. This steps us up from the range of relative volume variation your TT or CD players had by 50%, and probably even exceeds the capabilities of reel to reel wide and fast tape recorders we could never afford to pay for copies of albums as, after they beat recording straight to vinyl.
If you want to hear why digital audio spells money VS a TT setup, play a newer 24 bit track, (it was probably recorded straight to digital, and can meet the full 24 bits compared to tape), and listen for the ability to play the supporting sounds that aren't maximum volume at lower and therefore more richly accurate volumes than 16 bits allows to be represented.
Studios are getting away with this simple gear toggle to finally give us recordings that can exceed our playback gear's potential, even though 24 bits of variation only slightly exceeds our gear's tolerance. It works really well as an argument that beats TT's and even reel to reel, except for the part where only digital plays only samples for an only-ever too long of a time to bring out the variation of details, which requires the truly ever-changing time flow of non-digital audio. That's the part where studios are screwing their artists by not making the final wide-releases recordings that max out our newest gear, currently 384khz, or DSD 512 for our transfers from tape, (which will require no editing, just like DSD demands to prove it's superiority).
I've always thought that Pink Floyd's "The Wall" was clever garbage, and wasted some good musicianship from Pink Floyd, as they usually did. However, it came from late in tape's era, and Floyd is also good about not playing everything at max volume, so if you want to hear a transfer from tape to your new 24 bits of volume accuracy capabilities, that's a good recording to test it out on, currently only at (but at least) 96khz of sample rates. Plus, if you're like me, and were 10 years old when that came out, you've probably only ever heard it on crap, compared to your systems now, so you could be happy. Especially if you just received your box to put in front of your DAC that will rebuild any digital output you feed it into a really well built custom dedicated I2S output for your DAC. No more need for the uber-streamer instead of my jack-of-all-trades PC! It's true, once you've spent more than originally planned for a DAC that exceeds your expectations, you will get another 10% performance by buying a transport with a HQ digital output port on it for less $ than your DAC, instead of having to pay the insane 2x as much for the next DAC up, which your 1/2 price unit can still do 90% of. It's just that that same transport will give that DAC an extra 10% performance boost, too, so...
Now that everyone's digital playback has left physical CD's, there's no reason not to max out everyone's gear capabilities. Everyone can do 192khz of detail variation, by now, even your cheap phone's line out. But 24 bit recordings are ending the era of stunted sounding volume accuracy. Remember, 1 bit recordings would only be able to play all sounds that happen at 100%. 16 bit recordings just "wing" their non-max volume's accuracy, and round everything up, making it sound cheap, if you only knew the 24 bit versions first. DSD figured out ho to get past that, using millions of samples per second, instead. Except NO EDITING of DSD files! (The right one for old tape transfers, though). We need the mid-late studio Beatles re-releases in DSD 512, particularly for Abbey Road studios' era-busting recordings. Do you hear Paul's hard-soled shoe tapping the hard rubber coating on the floor of that studio? You didn't hear too much in the way of unnatural guitar reverb, thanks to that coating getting applied. If you ever get into a recording studio, you'd better not spill your drink on the rubber floor due to actually going with a girl for a change in there, either!
Welcome, 24 bit era, for maxing out our gear's volume sensitivity. Now, please focus on improving digital's detail sample rate. Details are always the harder part to max out our playback gear with, anyhow, although it's always possible for a favorite artist to produce a track that is a good simple sounding one, too.
Mmm, my EQ-plugin perfected HD800's for reference home monitoring. I've never heard anything else near this good. Really, the $3k Audeze planars are still only naturally EQ friendly, but with punchy bass instead of being analytical like these? I can add 2dB or more of sub bass, if I want more but unnatural amounts of bass. You'll never take my analytical ability after EQ away from me. I also have gigantic but lightweight cups that take up almost half of my head each, and my apparently my soundstage is king of headphones-sized. The word from users of the king of soundstages is that, to the dismay of the overly-bright best selling Grado fans, open backed headphones, when pushed to infinite volume levels in your own indoor listening room, can eventually make your cups the size of your walls, if you want reflections, but my soundstage with this current gear is unaltered 4 inches outside of my drivers, at this volume level, and it sounds really great, having a continually running deep bass line going on during this whole track. It's probably not always 4 inches out, I'm just cranked up listening to my new box-in-fronts output. A better digital signal into your DAC than a PC's USB port provides will make your soundstage maximum and open, and I got more bass slam after that, too. But if you don't want to spend $800, a 7 USB 3.1 port expansion card for $35 already kept my audio from sounding like it came from the cheapest output port possible, and made me wonder if it's still true that eventually I'll want that $300-500 audiophile USB port addon card. Unfortunately, those guys still have common sense on their side, even after this rebuilder.