until I read on and realized that I would have to buy another media player.
Neal Young's venture to deliver quality audio

I would have been interested in re-purchasing some of my music library in uncompressed formats, but I'm not going to buy a new portable media player to do it. Sorry Neal.

Now if the media ends up to be playable in my home system, we may have something.

Which will undoubtedly come with horrendous software and a worse UI. Seen this sort of junk before...

He doesn't even have a good idea to start with:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

If you want quality audio, buy CDs that are well mixed/mastered, and rip them yourself to a lossless format your current player does support. And get a better pair of headphones.

I found another post that takes on the bit-depth portion of the hi-res audio debate. I found it quite interesting. http://www.head-fi.org/t/415361/24bit-vs-16bit-the-myth-exploded

True enough. I was assuming he was also going to maybe get permission to remaster from the original masters. However, now I realize this was just my optimism and lazy skimming of the article.

I've also seen that write up. IMO, this is a case where the theory doesn't reflect the reality. I have been listening to quite a bit of HD music lately and have even compared CDs I have ripped at 320Kb mp3 to HD versions. I do notice a difference. Another consideration is that when you get an HD version of an album, many times these are remastered from the original tape.

You're last thought is on the mark. Even CDs that are bundled with the DVD-A version of an album were usually from different masters.

The only way to judge is to take a 24-bit wave, and dither it down to 16-bits and compare those two. I've done that, and can't tell the difference. In fact taking the 24-bit wave, encoding it with Lame using the "extreme" preset, and then turning it back into a 16-bit wave, I can't tell the difference from the original.

We don't need better distribution, we need better mastering.

In fact, here's a test I made for someone on another forum who was claiming to have golden ears...they never replied to me.

http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-01.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-02.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-03.wav
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/track-04.wav

One of these files is the original 24-bit version. One has been truncated to 16-bit (not even dithered). One has been converted to a 320 kbps CBR MP3, and back into a 24-bit wave using MADplay. And another an "extreme" VBR MP3, then simply decoded with Lame to a 16-bit wave. They've all been padded back up to 24-bits, so the file sizes are the same.

Tell me which is which.

I gave them a listen and cannot tell a difference over my Grado SR-60 headphones.

Same here. I just send this to a friend who's trying to convince me otherwise.

EDIT: The friend says track 1 is the original. How'd he do? (Feel free to PM me if you don't want to reveal anything here.)