I'm not even quite sure how to phrase my question, but here it goes...

+1 @erik_squires

I just learned something new!

Erik,
Thank you for taking the time to give a concise understandable explanation. 
Really like the pool/chlorine analogy!

Really like the pool/chlorine analogy!

Hah! I really thought that was my worst analogy ever.

@61falcon,

If you’re new to streaming, I would not limit myself to 16bit/44.1kHz recordings as suggested above. Both Tidal / QoBuz offers high resolution (upto 24bit/192kHz) content. I would leave it up to your ears to judge if you can discern audible differences between low and high resolution tracks.

24-bit sound is a tricky thing to gauge. Does it provide for a greater resolution of sound? IMO and in my system, absolutely YES. The technical explanation is, higher bit recordings has room for 256 times the data. Are you going to be able to hear that difference? Hard to say as human hearing supposedly tops out at 20kHz, but that does not make higher sample rates useless. According to the Nyquist rate, to fully capture a wave, it should be sampled at twice its highest frequency. In other words, a higher sample rate, and a greater bit depth, gives your sound more wiggle room, meaning sound peaks are less likely to be truncated and the subtleties of the music are less likely to be drowned out.

Hope this helps!

Lalitk: The vast majority of what I stream comes with the LED on 44K. If I seek out some high resolution song, on some of them anyhow, the LED will go to 96K. How to compare if you don't know what the bit rate is? How would one determine what the bit rate of the stream is? I use Deezer and Amazon HD.  I may cancel the Amazon as the Deezer interface works better for me and I am not a huge fan of Amazon plus, I don't find a whole lot of HD albums, individual songs yes, but not a lot of albums in HD.
Thanks!