Just to chime in, it's perfectly possible to make excellent sounding, 'professional' recordings at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and a bit depth of 24 bits, providing your gar is high quality and your knowledge and experience is up to scratch.

Judging from Airchair's OP, I get the impression that you're just starting out at this level of music production and recording. I'd assume that part of the "bad recording" comments you got is due to the 8 track/44.1/16 bit recorder you're using, as ericdano pointed out. It's a good guess that the built-in preamps and converters are poor consumer quality, if that.

No one, who is serious about audio quality today, will settle for 16 bit gear anyway. 24 bit is the way to go; that way you can set your levels to peak at, say, -12dB to get the best audio quality out of your converters and still compress your vocals after the fact with loads of dynamic range to spare. As for 96kHz, as others have said – just forget about it; it's not relevant in your situation.

Also, and no slur intended, music recording is an acquired skill. It would seem from your posts that you're not yet very experienced in the field, so I'd hazard a guess that part of the "bad recording" has to be attributed to driver error.

We've all been there, and the only thing is to just keep at it and also to read up on recording theory and technology. For instance, level staging of the signal chain can be very important for getting the best out of preamps and converters.

Another point – your Rokit monitors may still sound like s--t, if your listening room is badly tuned.

There are quite a few free websites dealing with how-to for recordists. I don't have any up my sleeve right now, but Google's your friend (unless you happen to live in mainland China).

Good luck and best regards,

Joachim