Can digital audio playback be improved by resolutions greater than 16/44.1?

My answer is qualified in two ways:
1. Not unless the higher numbers - I think calling them resolutions is misleading - are in some way needed to capture what enhanced mastering/recording techniques contain.
2. There are many other ways that digital audio can/will improve, in the realms of speaker sound quality and room response capability.
Until of course the time comes when we get digital implants feeding sound signals directly to the brain!

I'm not the expert here, and I know a number on this board have disciplined and detailed opinions on This, but for fun, I'll weigh in early and then enjoy stalking from the sidelines...

From my experience, all I have read, and personal opinion I'll answer this way:

Not in any way that makes any meaningful difference to actual listening in a real world.

I live in a real house, with a honest-to-God forced-air *furnace*... and a refrigerator that insists on humming and buzzing at the odd time, and where people actually flush a toilet, and ... you get the point.

I enjoy music, yes. I love quality audio, yes. If people want to isolate amazing 'listening rooms' and convince themselves they can 'hear a difference' *Obviously!* when they listen to a "HiRes" file... great for them. Have at 'er all you like. But don't tell the rest of us we're stupid for listening to poor quality audio. Truth is, we're listening to pretty much all the human ear can discern now.

Sure HiRes may sell a few extra files for product manufactures (but I'm not convinced most of the original recording sources are of a format that can actually have anything but a bunch of empty 0s in the extra bit depth of the file) and I'm one that will be quick to point out that stats sell products... maybe the world eventually needs to be producing equipment that can deliver better than the human ear can hear in a real environment... but I don't think we should allow ourselves to be fooled that it is real... many many people don't care about facts... HiRes is better than 'normal res' and we obviously need TVs that display in better grain than the eye can perceive from a natural watching distance. That is the art of marketing... and we all know that marketing and facts may have a 'loose' relationship.

many many people don't care about facts... HiRes is better than 'normal res' .
I get what you are saying, but Hi Res music has lost the race won first by wireless multi room supported via streaming, which in turn is under attack for mind/market share from voice and home automation integration. People are willing to even sacrifice some sound quality for these features; the brain can fill in the small sound quality gaps quite easily, but the lack of these features remains once the need for them is perceived and brain games can't be a substitute.

If none of these developments had taken place, Hi Res would probably have been the next big thing for lack of anything else because people are always looking for it and would have drunk that Kool Aid for lack of an alternative.

Niche markets will always exist for everything of course - see vinyl and how that exists with little in its favour in terms of either user ease or sound quality!

Here's a thought that I'm surprised hasn't occurred to me before. It is standard practice in audio production to add dither (low-level random noise) to an audio signal when converting from 24 bit to 16 bit. It helps to mask the truncation error caused by rounding the low level 24 bit signal to the nearest 16 bit value. As I've mentioned elsewhere, 16 bit steps can be as large as 6dB at low volume. Truncation error is most noticeable when fading music to silence (and is presumably more obvious in headphones or with the furnace turned off 🙂 )

My thought is this: if adding low-level noise is required to reduce the audible effect of truncation to 16 bits, surely it would be preferable to retain more bits and eliminate the need to add random noise?

This link has more detail.

My limited understanding of the subject:
Used appropriately, 16 bits can give you 96dB of dynamic range; more than enough for almost everything but the Big Bang.

But because it’s so difficult to record an unpredictable performance, and because this almost inevitably results in a sub-par recording, it’s more sensible to use 24 bits when capturing audio live. There’s no harm done (relative to a 16 bit recording) in reducing 24 bit files to 16 bits - as long as it’s done nicely; nicely being a layman's term for doing dithering properly, I suppose. My guess is that doing this isn't rocket science to people in the industry and doing it allows for a best of both worlds approach, the other world being the one where living with 16 bits is dictated by the need to be compatible with the 16/44 format.

Will music recorded in 24 bit, rendered competently down to 16, sound audibly worse/different than that which can be played as recorded, in the 24 bit format? That is the question to be answered.

16 bits gives you 90dB. Dithering buys you the 96dB. You are right about the recording process needing 24 bits. There IS harm done reducing this to 16 bits, which is why dithering is necessary. My argument stands - if dithering is necessary, then more than 16 bits is preferable on playback.

Come to think of it, I don't think much of subjective competency is involved here. Many here have said that if a hi res file is down sampled to a Sonos compatible format and played on Sonos front ended kit, it cannot be audibly distinguished from where the file is being played in the native format via hi res capable kit, all other things like the speakers in use being the same.

I haven't any ABX experience of this, but I haven't found anyone that has countered this claim via ABX either.

My argument stands - if dithering is necessary, then more than 16 bits is preferable on playback.The counter argument is that if the dithering effects cannot be audibly picked up, why are more than 16 bits necessary?

The point is that if dithering is perceived to be necessary (which I think we agree on), wouldn't it be preferable to increase the bit rate rather than add random noise to audio?

Given the constraint imposed by the format, I suppose there isn't the space to increase the bit rate. Preferable perhaps but not essential then, and good engineering is that which achieves the required outcome with the least expenditure of resources.