Can you hear bit rate?

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.

Think the only way to really compare is to listen to the same song at 16/44 then 24/96. On my setup most of the time 24/96 sounds much more open, depth, live. Just "bigger" in general. 

My HT setup can upconvert to 8k, does that mean I should? When you upconvert you are relying on the DAC to fill in all the missing information. On a good source it can be ok, but on a poor source it just makes it worse! To the point, I do no upconvert anything. 

Back to the issue, think is you have a very good DAC along with a less revealing setup, then maybe there is no perceived difference? With a very revealing setup, and lesser DAC there is a perceived difference?

Sometimes I think I can hear the difference between a 16 bit  and  24 bit file and sometimes I want to think I can hear the difference. I am frequently astounded by how good a 317 kbps AAC stream can sound when playing a well engineered cut. I have listened to 24/192 recordings that sounded like my old iPod Shuffle. I'm also 70 and am finally just starting to listen to the music instead of my system, just.

@erik_squires 

DSD is a very weird duck ... 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

DSD is a brilliant format for playback, but a difficult format for editing, because each bit is relative to the running total!  PCM assigns an absolute level to each sample.

For this reason, Philips and Merging Technologies created the DXD format to facilitate editing and merging of DSD streams.  From AI:

"DXD, or Digital eXtreme Definition, is a digital audio format that records in PCM at a 24-bit depth and a 352.8 kHz sampling rate. It is used primarily for post-processing high-resolution Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recordings because it provides a convenient, less destructive method for editing while maintaining high quality"

The Norwegian company 2l.no takes this much further and sometimes uses floating point number representations.  Their archives are in DSD1024 (from memory) from which all other digital formats they support can be recreated.  For immersive sound they use 9.1 channels.

I note that from the earliest days of CDs, Philips players used four-times oversampling so they could use much gentler low-pass filters.  Their early machines did not bother with the two least-significant bits, effectively giving 14-bit resolution.  They sounded better than contemporary CD players.

I doubt that any 24-bit audio files really make use of all 24-bits.  And I for one can definitely tell the difference between native DSD from a SACD and the same down-sampled to CD quality!