Delta-sigma modulation
The principle behind almost every audio converter made today: very few bits, an enormous sample rate, and a feedback loop that hides the error where nobody can hear it.
Instead of measuring each sample to 24-bit precision, the converter compares the signal against its own crude guess — often a single bit — millions of times per second. The error is accumulated and fed back, so the average of all those ones and zeros tracks the waveform. Quantisation noise is huge, but it is shaped up towards frequencies far above hearing, where a digital filter removes it as the stream is decimated to ordinary PCM.
Hiroshi Inose and Yasuhiko Yasuda at the University of Tokyo described the technique in 1962. It became the default in the 1990s, once it turned out to be cheaper to build fast, simple circuits than slow, precise ones — a precision resistor costs more than a million transistors.