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

@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!

Um, the question is do you hear an improvement? :)

So, usually, 44 means 44.1 kHz/16 bits. That's the Redbook standard.
96 kHz music downloads are almost always 24 bits or 96/24

However!! online radio has some variations. 44/20 (or 44/24?)  and 96/16 are some I have seen.

What are you using to feed your Dac the streaming signal? A lot of streamers will show you the sample rate as you stream. Right now I am listening to Qobuz and on my streaming app the sampling rate shows as 44.1khz 16bit and hovers between 7-800 kbps.

61falcon,

I use QoBuz for streaming on my Aurender N10. The Aurender’s Conductor app shows each track / album resolution.

I did a trial of Amazon HD and it’s app interface and content were quite disappointing. They have a long ways to go. Since Deezer max out at 16bit/44.1kHz resolution, you can’t really compare unless you do a trial run with QoBuz. Tidal will only give you higher than 16bit/44.1 resolution if your DAC is capable of decoding MQA files.

If you choose do a trial run with QoBuz, you can then do a A/B comparison and decide for yourself if high resolution streaming is worth shelling out extra money.
In my system, QoBuz is the only streaming service that allows me to fully appreciate the high resolution content.