Can you hear bit rate?

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!

By way of analogy, the difference in the appearance of an 8 bit digital photograph compered to its 16 bit version is pretty much impossible to discern. But if you're going to do any post-processing in Photoshop (playing with contrast, levels curves etc.) the extra bit-depth is very important. The same is true for recording sound that will be digitally manipulated in post, which now is pretty much everything, which is why even cheap consumer home studio gear records never records at anything less than 24/96. I agree that this matters far more on the upstream production side than on consumer format end. My Meridian CD player doesn't make me thirst for higher bit depth streaming options- but, that said, I'm just happier with my vinyl rig, which lays bare all the physics of sound reproduction instead of shrouding it in a black box full of ones and zeros.

A number of years ago, I tried a not particularly rigorous experiment with various bit depths and sample rates. It involved taking an excellent sounding 24/192 FLAC file and converting it down to 16/44 and a couple of points in between. On listening back with a highly resolving replay system, the CD quality file was just as enjoyable an experience as the original high res version. It appeared that not much was lost in the conversion. I came to the conclusion that the mastering of the album and quality of the streamer and DAC, etc. was far more important than than the resolution of the file.