to be clear: high quality master tapes are often at very high resolutions with frequency ranges over 30 khz. they are way better quality than the vinyl copies that were sold in stores, and you can in theory retrieve and retain a very large amount of information by digitizing the old tapes that you cannot get on vinyl. if you can get it on to a virgin consumer quality reel, you're getting something comparable to 24 bit audio, until it starts to degrade, which is instantly. the best tapes in the best studios in the 70s are comparable to a 24 bit or 32 bit master in terms of information. it's the masters produced for vinyl from those tapes that were of low quality, because vinyl playback is incapable of producing a high frequency spectrum. you can completely solve the problems in vinyl playback by digitizing, and you also permanently preserve the information when you do. but you only preserve it at the level you take it in at.

24-bit audio didn't exist at all until the late 90s and my understanding is that, even in 2026, it's virtually impossible to get a clean 24-bit chain. at some point, you're downsampling, and then all is lost. you should stay at 16 the moment you downsample. you should never re-up, but the reality is that the signal is bounced back and forth repeatedly and then sent out at both rates for consumer sales. when that's the case, the better quality to sell it at is almost always 16-bit rather than the 24 bit upsample.

there are consequently better opportunities to digitize old tapes, if they aren't yet totally degraded, then there are to upsample recordings in the digital era, but only if you actually go back and do it, and when they tried to do that people yelled that it didn't sound like vinyl, so they went back and used the old vinyl masters, instead. 

so, you go to a store and buy a dvd audio or log on to a streaming site and see something marketed as 24-bit audio, but it's often just a digital capture of the fucking vinyl master with a low cut at 15 khz. you're not getting 24 bit audio, even in those rare cases where you could. you're not even getting cd quality audio. you're getting something worse than a lossy mp3 sold to you as 24-bit.

i'm avoiding the a-word. my dad used the a-word a lot, and i don't like the pomposity of it. but i'm a math nerd and a recording engineer in addition to being a composer and i know what i'm doing and i certainly want to listen to the best quality i can get my hands on at all times. i'd love for 24 bit audio to be a real thing and i'd invest in it if it were but it isn't. 

or it is not yet.