Can you hear bit rate?

Paul McGowen. He said in order to get the most out of high res DSD the original recording MUST be done using DSD throughout. To take a standard resolution and then up-sample to DSD would not yield a better result.

DSD is a very weird duck.  Because of the way digitization happens it was very hard for instance to apply digital EQ to the recording afterwards.  This made a lot of things difficult to try to keep clean.  PCM however lends itself to EQ very nicely, allowing you to EQ track by track. 

If you had DSD and wanted to EQ it, you'd have to either convert to PCM, or convert to analog, EQ, and then return to DSD, not really a very good process overall for purity. 

BTW, (unpaid plug for friends) have you guys checked out Blue Coast Records? 

Anthony H. Cordesman, late reviewer for TAS, wrote the following. I agree with it completely, which is why I kept a copy:

When it comes to actual recordings, I have not yet heard any reason to even go as high as 192kHz. Some of my colleagues disagree, but I have so far found rates above 96kHz/24 bits to be a waste of money. I do buy the 96kHz/24-bit version of the music I download or stream for safety’s sake, but most of the time, a good 16-bit/44.1kHz version of the same mastering of a recordings will sound exactly the same. One has to be very careful in paying what usually is nearly twice as much for the 96kHz/24-bit when there is no way to hear whether there is any difference, particularly with a modern DAC with really good filtering. Oddly enough, the better your DAC, the less likely you are to hear any difference.

Original text here.

My two cents is that I'm much more interested the care and aesthetic choices made during the recording, mixing and mastering process than I am in the file storage format chosen for consumer distribution.  I have some stunningly beautiful recordings done in 44.1K/16 while I've heard some very so-so recordings done in 96K/24 or 192K/24.  Put another way, for me, music first, recording quality second, file storage format last. 

It’s very debatable once you get to  CD res.  A good recording to start with goes a long way.  

I agree wholeheartedly with @soix when he said:

All the 24-bit recordings I’ve heard have a liquidity, flow, ease, and naturalness about them most 16-bit recordings don’t, and as a result they sound relatively, for lack of a better word, grainy and less refined/natural by comparison.

I don’t think my ears are good enough to tell the difference between 192 kHz and 96 kHz, but whether a recording is 16-bit or 24-bit seems to matter more than to that sense of ease and flow than whether it’s sampled more times per second.

Maybe that makes sense, because 16-bit can "only" resolve only 65,536 possible variations, where 24-bit can resolve 16.8 million.  That’s a x256 difference as opposed to a x4 difference between 48 kHz and 192 kHz.

I think it has a lot to do with the frequency and complexity of music.  I listen primarily to jazz and classical music.  Complex music with a lot going on at high frequency can become  a screechy mush on CD that is painful to listen to.  Classical music on vinyl or high-resolution FLAC sounds smoother, richer, clearer and more open.

To put it another way, all hi-fi pales compared with live music, but the better it is, the better chance you have of achieving a suspension of disbelief where you believe you are there.  Any recording can burst that happy bubble, but lower resolution formats do so sooner, and more frequently, than better ones.

On the other hand, I have a treasured CD called "Jadyadie" with John Dankworth playing with his son, the bassist, Alec Dankworth.  It’s fabulous.  I can’t fault it, and I think that must be because it’s both simple: just two (superb) performers, both playing instruments in the low-to-mid frequencies, and well within a CD’s comfort zone.

That’s my penny-worth anyway.

Guy.