Resolution is far less important than bit color depth. We barely need 4K(Alexa used to be 2K) much less 8K footage for something to look good on a tv.
When I worked in music production a while back, we often had the problem of source material recorded at low amplitude to 16-bit media (e.g. DAT, CDDA, ADAT). While 16-bit is theoretically sufficient, in the real world you need headroom while recording in order to avoid clipping. So we'd often wind up with grungy sound from inadequate bit-depth during capture and intermediate production.
The studio I used to work at was one of the first ADAT studios back in the 90s, and they did a lot of rock. One of the ways they got past the limitations of the medium was to compress and limit to tape. You generally don't want to do that unless you have tons of time to set up and get it right (a la Rudy Van Gelder), which was not in most budgets. But it worked well enough and the ADAT recordings out of this studio sounded way better than most.
Mercifully storage has gotten cheaper in the decades since and you really shouldn't capture to 16 bits any more.
If we want the best quality end product, free from low-res artifacting, we need to preserve an excess of resolution all the way through production until the final export. Exactly how headroom much is enough? Enough that artifacts arising from insufficient resolution are not perceivable in the end product.
If you record at 16 bits of depth you are pretty much automatically forcing your engineer to choose between quality and range when they are normalizing the recording.
The most important rule of audio recording is "always be ready to roll tape". What the engineer does is of little consequence compared to the talent. Don't ever fuck up a keeper take.
Recording with some extra bits means that even if your gain staging was bad, you just get some extra uncorrelated noise, not correlated quantization distortion.
As for whether this stuff is perceptible, there are two issues at play. First, differences which are not perceptible during production can result in a perceptible difference in the final product. This is easiest to understand with a visual analogy: if you have inadequate resolution of an image during processing, the end result may be slightly defocused and smeared.
Second, as I described elsethread, quantization distortion is a particularly pernicious form of degradation, poisonous in small amounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkS4NSv-0M It is hard to listen for it during production, so we defend against it by giving ourselves lots and lots of headroom.
As for how much safety margin is "enough" during initial capture... We're looking at a stark choice between either 2 or 3 bytes per sample. 2 bytes seems to be borderline, while 3 bytes seems to be plenty. It would be hard to quantify a safety margin more precisely than that.
Recording close-mic'd drums to analog tape is actually a useful technique when maxing out levels because analog tape saturation can be aesthetically superior to digital peak limiting for shaving drum peaks — analog tape saturates high frequencies first. It wasn't uncommon to either record basic tracks to analog then transfer to Pro Tools, or even to track to Pro Tools then bounce the drums out to analog tape and back.
For the record, there were loudness wars back in the vinyl days, since it was seen as important to have your 45 rpm single "compete" with others in the jukebox. It wasn't something new in the aughts.
> If analog recording captured a much more flexible dynamic range
It doesn't, especially not in comparison to modern digital. Dynamic range is not a strong point of analog because of tape hiss.
The issue with low res digital is that truncation distortion is non-harmonic (not an integer multiple of the input frequency) and so is disproportionately aesthetically damaging even in small quantities — in other words, digital grunge sounds worse than tape hiss.
The more you capture, the more you have to play with at later production stages.
Netflix streams 4K but often doesn’t look so great over internet compared to any cinema in my area which projects only 2K on a huge screen but from bigger files.
I discovered this playing with my scanner, looking for the best settings. It surprised me.