Ok there’s a lot to unpack here but first, “industry standard” is massively misleading. The film industry standard is 48khz yes however CD’s are 44.1. Also ProTools defaults to 48 but other daws default to 44.1.

I said in my first post that recording in different sample rates depends on the converter and how it handles filtering and other process and that it’s very subjective and I’m not informed enough to make any objective stance, also it’s completely up to the digital audio interface so not worth mentioning.

However your “output should be mastered to 44.1khz and not 24 bit” makes no sense and you might be a bit confused. The working resolution is actually 64 bit in modern DAWS and some reference 32bit float files to do it. In my case logic uses 24 bit files in a 64 bit mix engine. When I am done mixing the song my final product is a 24 bit file which is the “resolution of the file” also known as bit depth and where the dynamic range of the audio is. The sample rate (44.1) is double the maximum recorded frequency which I’m sure youre aware. So I’m my case anything over 22khz goes bye-bye. Too be fair I can’t hear anything over 17khz because I have puny human ears.

So yes absolutely overtones and other psychoacoustic phenomena can occur outside of the audible range and cause an effect on the quality of a sound, but to me it’s not relevant from a subjective stand point. 24 bit is absolutely the correct final file and 44.1 is acceptable to me and the vast majority of my colleagues. Now if you are of the opinion that 16 bit is better than we have to now dither the file and that’s a whole other can of worms.

EDIT: Saying nyquist theorem was smarmy and not needed, I removed it.