The industry wants to be able to sell you something "better" and 24/192 is clearly bigger and therefore better than 16/48.
This is the same reason I'm convinced we're going to get 8k phone displays someday.
If the recording industry wants to sell me a "platinum" version of recordings, what I'd really like to have is different mastering of an album: at least one for noisy environments like the car, and one for higher-quality environments like my home theater. If you're familiar with "The Loudness Wars", this is a reaction to that. NiN tried to do this with their "audiophile" mix of Hesitation Marks (although a lot of people think they did not succeed, http://www.metal-fi.com/terrible-lie/ )
On the other hand, I don't need to buy any new equipment to support that, so the equipment guys aren't going to be happy. I don't know if there's any silver bullet for them--if there is a hypothetical advancement that would cause me to upgrade my system, I can't envision it.
4k would exceed that significantly on a 6" display. Thus why parent compares an 8k phone to the 24/192 discussion - the benefits are nothing more than being able to advertise a larger number.
I kind of had that effect at a trade show a while ago where they had huge demo displays like 12 foot /6000 pixels across and I couldn't see all the detail at a usual viewing distance but could make it out in small areas by wandering up close. It was kinda cool. I'm not sure it would have that much value in a domestic setting but in something like a museum / gallery could be good.
so, carrying that to its logical conclusion, does that mean that at some point we will create displays w/ such a high resolution that they will, in some sense, be creating a "universe" which is indistinguishable from that which they are displaying? or, i guess that would mean the display essentially is what it is displaying. is that even possible in our universe, or would that be akin to creating energy / matter from nothingness?
clearly the display would blink "let there be light"* at startup.
This is the same reason I'm convinced we're going to get 8k phone displays someday.
If the recording industry wants to sell me a "platinum" version of recordings, what I'd really like to have is different mastering of an album: at least one for noisy environments like the car, and one for higher-quality environments like my home theater. If you're familiar with "The Loudness Wars", this is a reaction to that. NiN tried to do this with their "audiophile" mix of Hesitation Marks (although a lot of people think they did not succeed, http://www.metal-fi.com/terrible-lie/ )
On the other hand, I don't need to buy any new equipment to support that, so the equipment guys aren't going to be happy. I don't know if there's any silver bullet for them--if there is a hypothetical advancement that would cause me to upgrade my system, I can't envision it.