Oh yeah, and despite my 16bit comment I appreciate that this is an audiophile forum, so you will want to track at 24/96 and make sure you do all your processing at that rate.

If you're intending to subsequently burn cds from your recordings you'll need to truncate and sample rate reduce them back to redbook (16/44.1) this should always be the final process and you should use a 'dithering' algorithm and appropriate dither noise to make sure this downsampling and bit truncation is as clean as possible.