Certainly the total experience of a recording is the performance, plus the quality of the sound captured on the recording.
In this thread however we are discussing whether digital formats sound different. We are also discussing the recording itself as a recording.
The sound of a piano, beautiful recorded, will be the same gorgeous sound whether a wonderful pianist plays or if I play. While you will not want to listen to my playing, the sound itself will be equally stunning on both recordings.
The act of recording, engineering, mastering and publishing are other types of actions.
All is related, but they are different activities. We can discuss whatever part of that chain we like. One part does not exclude or contradict the other part.
But they are different activities.
Another way of looking at it is yes, the quality of the piano matters in the terms of instruments. But the quality of the piano is irrelevant when trying to determine if there’s any inherent meaningful difference between CD, high res pcm, or DSD. The reason being is that the same high or low quality piano would be used in each recording. Therefore negating the piano’s significance in figuring out which recording format is better.
It’s a mathematical fact that 24/192 can encode a bit more than two octaves higher frequency with 48dB less quantisation noise than 16/44.1. On that basis we have to say that the high res encoding has a greater potential for sonic fidelity than the CD resolution.
The challenge in making any real world comparison is that the mechanisms for creating and playing back these recordings contain many other variables, and eliminating or equalising those seems to be close to impossible. Chief among those are the different low-pass filters, both digital and analog, that could be involved in recording, production and playback. A NOS DAC (like the Metrum Octave I had prior to the DS) makes things equal on playback by not doing any digital filtering at all – and 44.1 and 192 sound starkly different in that instance. But in all other cases what you’re hearing is heavily influenced by the filtering and potentially noise shaping and modulation performed by the DAC, layered on top of whatever processing was done to produced the files in the first place.
I have found that I generally prefer the sound of Roon’s 2x/4x upsampling (which is done using a low-pass filter) over the same function performed on the FPGA inside the DS. Many DACs offer selectable filters which have audible differences. These same choices have to be made when producing recordings, even of the exact same material. When making comparisons we’re hearing the combined effects of all those choices, not simply comparing the same thing in 192 vs 44.1.
Back to the starting point, in principle a recording and playback chain optimised for 24/192 is better able avoid filtering choices that impact on the audible band in terms of phase and frequency response. We don’t often see that chain unbroken from end to end though, and too many “high res” tracks have had a 22kHz LPF applied to their content at some point during production.
Many DACs make beautiful sounds from CD quality audio, and for that I am very grateful. Anything better is a bonus.