Is hi res digital music worth it does it damage gear?

Here are some intriguing thoughts and comments from what I consider a fairly reputable source on whether hi-res digital is really worth it as they contend there is no scientific proof and the second more scary contention it may actually damage gear under some circumstances.
I am on the fence so far but I would like to hear from our resident experts pool on the damage issue at least.
I'm sure there are pros and cons and proofs and dispute of proofs but airing this might bring some clarity.
I have both a lot of hi-res digital music and some expensive speakers at stake.

http://audioshark.org/computer-digital-audio-11/goldmund-whitepaper-high-resolution-7063.html#.Vfc_NT5ofFQ

I'd think it much fuss about ... nothing. Even if you believe the hype about IMD sensitivity of any quality driver, they're talking a target range of 25-30K where this occurs. I'd be surprised if even a minimal percentage of typical hi-res source has that sort of high end. CD-4 is the only source encoding I'm familiar with that regularly encounters that range, and that's just a control frequency that never makes it past the decoders.

Frequency range is just a small part of "hi-res" anyway. Full audible spectrum, yes, assUming that was available in the master. But mostly it's opening up the recording to provide cleaner, more accurate reproduction by giving the DACs more bits to play with. Regardless, I'd expect quality vinyl played on a high end system would give you higher frequencies.

IMHO, dbx encoding was (and still is) one of the cleanest compression schemes ever devised, and even that was limited to 30-15k on playback - not much better than a high end cassette really. The magic happened when the recording was decompressed with amazing amounts of headroom and an incredibly low noise floor.

This issue reminds me of the contention among one of the audio lunatic fringes...though it saw the light of day in one of the then-popular audiophile magazines...that playing digitally mastered LPs caused damage to turntable platter spindle bearings.