Not many playback devices that go beyond CD-quality sound cards, so upon receipt of the stream it will simply be “translated” into 16/44.1, losing whatever edge you had while mastering.
Also, it depends on your source. If your tracks are made by you in a DAW, you might have 24/48 source material (although I’d hope you would have 24/96 resolution to work with), but if you use regular tracks, none of them will be any higher than 16/44.1.
And even if you master your own tracks, which you created in 24/48 or 24/96 (which is great as you have the extra frequency range and headroom while manipulating your sound in your DAW), it’s common and best practice to “bounce” (=convert) your tracks to CD-quality before publication. One of the advantages is that your DAW most likely has better bouncing tools than if you leave the conversion to the playback end. Going from 24 to 16 and from 96/48 to 44.1 inevitably means that some things get lost. The better the conversion the better the result. So I would always advise people to work with that standard outside their own production environment, being 16/44.1.
I have never heard of people hearing up to 28KHz, 20KHz being the accepted maximum at the high end and that only baby’s and infants usually have that range. Not saying such people don’t exist but they would be such an anomaly to not warrant the extra quality for the other 99.99% that probably stops short of 18KHz. Getting technical here, the reason they made 44.1 the standard for audio tracks is that they found out that you needed at least twice the audible frequency range in order to get things to sound good (I’ll leave THAT technical explanation out of this post lol). For video (DVD) purposes they lifted that to 48KHz. Following the at least twice rule, for someone with a 28KHz upper limit, you’d have to record in 60KHz or more, meaning 96KHz, so your 48KHz would still fall short.
Just my two cents. Again, I know diddly about streaming, so, good post guys!
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