The Transporter will handle 24/96 natively, although reports have surfaced that the embedded processor is close to being maxed out, such that there may be issues if you you have CPU intensive flac decompression (- and a CPU expensive screen saver / animation going at the same time. People have reported success with workarounds such as
* don't use expensive screensavers / animations (its the music thats important)
* Use server side decompression ( trade CPU for bandwidth)
* decompress + recompress flacs at a lower compression (e.g. -3)
See example here Very very strange Transporter problem - Squeezebox : Community : Forums
High rez tracks can be downsampled automatically server side using sox , resulting in up to 24/48 or 24/44.1 data that is played at that native resolution on the other existiing SB clients (or the transporter if you are syncing with other clients, as the lowest common denominator is used in this case)
Some people have argued that this is more than adequate in most cases, 24 bits is better than 16 , and Nyquist frequency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia saying that you'll get 22Khz (48/2) back out - assuming there was any content at or above that frequency in the original source material.
More may not necessarily be better e.g. The hype about 24/192 material 24/192 - Squeezebox : Community : Forums
Myself, I'm happy with what I currently have, await the Touch with interest (My understanding is that the hardware is ready, and the software will be ready "When it's ready")
We live in interesting times, so something better / faster / cheaper may appear, or not. In the meantime what I have works, makes me happy, and the appearance of another product may not necessarily change that. YMMV IMHO