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[Denon82]

How can I tell if my system can play hi-res properly? If I'm playing a 96/24 file is my receiver and speakers playing it with all the detail? What specs do you look for in speakers? My AVR is spec'd to play 96/24.

I have a pair of Klipsch RF 82's
Denon 1912 AVR
Source is a HTPC connected via HDMI to the AVR
JRiver Software playing FLAC - Bitstreaming

I'm not a big believer that I will hear a difference between 44.1/16 and 96/24 but would like to at least confirm my stereo can handle both formats properly so I can decide myself if I can hear a difference. Of course source files are equally important, so I'm making sure I have good quality files.

[MikeO]

Hi

The 44.1 96 debate rages !!

I am not sure technically on your base question but your ears are the final arbiter , most equipment in recent years will handle Hi Res , the analogue end is the limit as a rule.

That said I have found that 24/96 tracks are infinitely better even to my aging ears. Pretty much anything that has been released as Hi Res has gone through some form of remastering , clean up jiggery pokery .

Try the 24/96 Led Zeppelin remasters , they are really quite different from my ripped "Remastered" Cd's from 1990

I am still not convinced that there is a Hi Res difference per se but the Hi Res ones are probably several incarnations closer to the master recordings.

Mike

[mwillems]

How can I tell if my system can play hi-res properly? If I'm playing a 96/24 file is my receiver and speakers playing it with all the detail? What specs do you look for in speakers? My AVR is spec'd to play 96/24.

If you're just trying to determine if your speakers can reproduce all content potentially encoded in a 96KHz file, the relevant spec to look at is the speaker's frequency response.  96KHz sampled content can contain "audio" information up to 48KHz.  I put audio in quotes because 20KHz is the normal limit of human hearing (in the sense of hearing an audible tone) and most people can't hear even that high especially as they age.  FWIW People can sometimes perceive high frequency sound in ways other than hearing an audible tone (for example, loud ultra high frequency sound gives me headaches even when I can't actually hear it), see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect.  Ultra high frequency sound can also cause modulation in the audible band, which can be good (if that UHF sound was present in the original source and intended to be there) or not so good (if that UHF sound was introduced inadvertently in the transfer to Hi-Res, or is causing your equipment to intermodulate because it's struggling to reproduce "out of band" content).

However, I don't know that I've seen commercial speakers with frequency responses much above 40KHz, and most don't reproduce much above 20Khz (I've seen ribbon tweeters that can play well past 40KHz, but I haven't seen commercial speakers using them).  Even if a speaker does reproduce sound that high-pitched, the shortness of the wavelengths would ensure that it would be highly directional except on headphones (i.e. unevenly distributed across the listening area).

None of this is intended as a direct comment on the value of Hi Res audio one way or the other, more just a note that looking for speakers that can "fully resolve" the high resolution is probably going to be fruitless for a few reasons (not least of which because they're hard to come by).