I'm totally with you on Les Paul - it's hard to imagine what modern music would have been like without him.

Not so convinced by the audio argument, however. The Nyquist Theorem just says that, to represent an audio signal digitally, you need to use double your highest audio frequency as the sample rate. So if you have amazing ears (I assume that you are an 8-year-old boy, right?) that can still hear to 20kHz, you need a 40kHz sample rate. So the standard CD rate of 44.1kHz should cover it, assuming an imperfect (non-brick-wall) filter at the top end. This is backed up by heaps of empirical testing; I've never seen well-executed research that could prove the merits of higher sampling rates.

Besides, most popular mics don't output past 20kHz, so you're wasting space recording data that isn't even there. At best, you're recording noise artifacts.

One redeeming feature about some (but not most) A-D converters that use higher sampling rates is reduced jitter, and there is some evidence that some listeners can hear the difference. But this just speaks to the merits of a better clock, as the reduced jitter is usually still there at lower sampling rates (when using the same equipment).

24 bit certainly makes sense, as you can back off the preamps, record more cleanly and with a lot more headroom, and have room to adjust things later in the mixing/mastering stage (where you'll almost always go back to 16 bit anyway, hopefully with some good dithering).

...Sorry for the Professor Audio lecture. I'll leave it there, and you can agree or not. Time to rock the evening away in a tribute to Les Paul. Where to begin?