I find when streaming hi-rez files the best resolution for me is 24/44.1 or 48. Anything higher like 96 or 192 sounds to sanitary. It’s almost lifeless.
Three possibilities come to mind:
1) The song's sound quality.
Most of my best sounding songs are 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. That is because they were mixed and mastered by competent people. Had those same people done the job for a 176.4 kHz / 24 bit digital file, I believe that it would sound better. But for reasons that escape me, they create mostly CD resolution / bit depth files.
2) Higher sampling rates require higher levels of clock accuracy. Your clock has to time the delivery of many more sample in the same time slice. Less accuracy equals more jitter.
Jitter is hard to hear, until you remedy it. Once you lose the jitter, you will know it when you hear it. Jitter will ruin the sound quality. How much damage will depend on how much jitter. From your description of what you are hearing, I suspect that you have a fair amount of jitter.
3) This one is a guess on my part:
I believe that the faster a clock has to run, the more noise it will generate. And like jitter, you will recognize the noise when you eliminate the noise (note that you can never 100% eliminate noise or jitter, but you can get pretty darn close).
I used to stream, directly from my laptop to my DAC, using a mass produced USB cable. It was terrible, at any sampling rate. I replaced the mass produced USB cable with an Audioquest USB cable, and my sound quality went from unlistenable to very enjoyable. That upgraded USB cable was preventing most of the noise from reaching my DAC. I did not know that I had noise when the music just sounded awful. It just sounded, as you described: lifeless.
Years later, while researching replacing my laptop with a dedicated streaming device that was purpose built for streaming, I discovered digital-to-digital converters (DDCs). They are often referred to as re-clockers. They take a digital feed from any streaming device (in my case, my laptop), and they re-clock the samples and feed them to your DAC.
The DDC that I purchased costed far less than the amazing sounding streamers that correctly receive high acclaim by users and reviewers.
Well, my DDC took my digital sound quality up several notches, to a point where it routinely exceeds my sound quality expectations. That is mostly due to its super-accurate clocks that virtually eliminate jitter. And a good DDC will also further reduce noise. And a good DDC will have two clocks -- one to handle 44.1 kHz and its multiples, and one to handle 48 kHz and its multiples.
@polkalover if you remedy what I believe is probably a noise and / or jitter problem, you will find high resolution files to sound very good (provided they were mixed and mastered by competent people -- which is the exception -- not the rule).
My guess is that you have more of a jitter issue than a noise issue. Because if you had a noise issue, then nothing would sound good. However, it is possible that higher sampling rates are causing your streamer to produce more noise.
All streamers are computers. But streamers are purpose built computers to do one job with top-notch quality. But like any product, they vary in design and parts quality.
See if you can borrow a different streamer, or demo a good DDC, to hear if your high-res streaming problem goes away. If it does go away, I bet that lower res files will also sound better.
The cables matter, too. Use something good.
