This video is total revealing about the subject: you don't need more than 44.1kHz/16bit

 

Thank you for linking the paper!
I'm not sure, if I would follow his point of view, though. From first view I feel the paper is first about his personal views and not referring to actual research. But I will read it again more thoroughly later.

While some would argue, that converter quality in general is no problem anymore, because even cheap consumer grade chips have reached a standard that was "pro" a few years ago, that was not my point.
You seem to regard RME converters as subpar, which I do not. But that is just my experience/opinion.
<aside="opinion">
There's always a lot of hype and hearsay in talk about tools. A lot of religion and magic comes from the fact, that you cannot make a hit like a craftsman can plan and build his things. That can lead to cargo cult kind of behavior and the idea, that sacrifices to proven gods may help. As long as one sacrifices only money and not innocent virgins, it's fine with me.
</aside>
Without a doubt proven tools are often more reliable, could probably improve workflow and quality of the result and are a worthy investment in general. I just do not see any technical reason or serious experimental proof that the RME stuff does not fit the bill for any application.

That's why I asked.

Happy Holidays!

 

It was really nice seeing the 32bit headroom in practice. Albeit even a bigger sized files, I'd always found them to be some really smooth
and cleaner sounding takes. Higher bit rate recordings are definitely ideal but isn't always ideal for challenged ITB setups.
That said, if you can swing it, go for it. I think I'll bump things back up again myself.

 

For distribution, yes, that's true. But not for recording, since you would lose headroom.

From the brilliant Xiph article: