One thing about Cookie's recordings, the redbook sounds great too. And your experiment in your last post was 24/96 native vs 24/96 upsampled redbook, so that's one reason it was close.
Her recordings are amazing. I play in a band with a guitar player who favors acoustic over electric (or as he calls it, "the dark side"). He has several acoustic guitars in the $3-4K range like Taylor, Breedlove (sp?), etc. I played this cut for him and his response was "better than live!".
Cookie sent me a note. My Redbook version was ripped from the original collection CD. Turns out Redbook was compressed during mastering for this version (which may explain in part why it sounds more dense). She said a better test would be the art lande songs, which are the same mastering. Plus, the new blue coast collection gold disc is 44.1 with no compression.. and should sound comparably to the 96k.
Thanks for the help getting this set up. I'll crawl back under my rock.