From a consumer perspective hi-rez is a marketing term to sell old catalog. As a consequence, it is dead on arrival or at least condemmed to a niche because of two reasons:
- latest hot100 music rarely needs more than 8 bits (exagerating) - more objectively popular 'constant loud' music rarely uses anything close to CD quality
- allowing upsampled digital masters or sampled from analog sources/tape to be labeled high-rez = high-res does not mean anything 95% (99%?) of the time.
People that try to objectively evaluate it often buy their favourite album from the 70-80s, say 'Jazz in the Pawnshop', Beatles, what-have-you, downsample it and cannot make out a difference. Then, they dismiss it.
My experience is the following: I have some 24/88.2 and 24/96 mastered 'orchestra' music and I blind tested both myself and a few friends. People can tell the difference between 24bit and ('compressed' to) 16bits (you usually loose 1-2 bits with noise/dithering). People that can hear 16-18kHz frequencies hear also changes in DAC filters at 44.1kHz but not at 2x frequencies.
None of this is actually important. We (as in me and the 3 friends that participated) did not have a clear preference. Also, listening to music with wide open dynamic range is not everybodies cup of tea. I would not call it relaxing; it is acutually intimidaing - you will spill the glass of wine when percussions hit after a silent period.
For reference, testing was done on B&W 800 Diamonds, Bel Canto preamp+1000W monoblocks in a room that has about 10-20dB noise floor. Also, I have only 2 albums (out of hundreds) where I'd endorse high-rez (Frank Ticheli - Playing with Fire; and Haddad/Sherman/White - Exploreations in Space and Time). There may be more (maybe some sondtracks?) but I did not test further. It is excessively difficult to find true highrez albums so I usually don't bother.
Sorry if this comes off as a bit steep. I'm quite passionate about this topic because I think that the 'high-res' term hurts those people/businesses that want to give us objectively better music quality (whether we can hear it or not). This poll -as is- only enforces it.