I've always considered myself very good at perceiving the smallest details related to sound quality, whether during live shows or just digital streaming.

TIDAL has made me even more conscious of the quality of sound I listen to and I am constantly searching for devices to better utilize 192KHz FLAC streaming.

I don't have the perfect headset for such high sample rates, yet.

But that doesn't stop me from preparing my setup.

• My personal laptop runs Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS.

• My audio controller is the Realtek ALC3254.

• I use pipewire for sound configuration.

I wanted to check which rate does the tidal-hifi app supports during streaming and experiment with different configurations to detect any subtle differences.

I have found that one way is to edit the file

/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf

by uncommenting the line

default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 48000 ]

and adding the following rates:

default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 44100, 48000, 88200, 96000, 176400, 192000 ]

Source: [1], [2]

Even after restarting the pipewire service and tidal app, pw-top kept showing a rate of 48000.

So, in the same configuration file I uncommented and changed the line

default.clock.rate = 48000

to

default.clock.rate = 96000

and then to

default.clock.rate = 192000

Source: [3]

For every configuration change it is required to restart the pipewire and tidal

systemctl --user restart pipewire.service
systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.socket

and then run

pw-top

Finally, I selected a song that supports 96KHz streaming.

I've set the same rate in configuration file, restarted everything and this is the result.

To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve achieved anything in practice 😂

But, at least I tried.

Maybe the real difference will become apparent when I can afford a high-end headset- who knows?