High bit-rate web audio (don't use Chromium)

I switched streaming music services. I found one that supports high bit-rate lossless audio. As a bonus, it plays through standard web browsers and does not require an electron app.

I’ve also been experimenting with the PipeWire stack and tools.

I’m currently on Ubuntu/Kubuntu, so I used the ubuntustudio-audio-config utility to change the system bit-rate to 4096 192000. The first number is the buffer size. I’m not sure if it needs to be increased, but why not. The default seems to be 1024 48000, which will definitely cap you at 48 kHz.

Despite the new service claiming high bit-rates, I noticed the audio coming out of Chromium was always 48 kHz (output from pw-top):

I assumed this was because the system rate was set to 48 kHz, but it remained after increasing the system rate. Or maybe because my default USB speakers seem to only support 48 kHz.

Throw in some time and boredom and I discovered a cheap USB audio interface supports 96 kHz over SPDIF.

The next challenge was testing. The system is supposedly running at 192 kHz. I have a device that appears to support 96 kHz connected to a receiver that will show me the bit-rate of the SPDIF input, but was still showing 48 kHz.

At this point, I don’t know if Chromium is the problem or not… The next step is a high bit-rate test file. This site has some uncompressed test files at high bit-rates: https://www.audiocheck.net/testtones_highdefinitionaudio.php I could have just generated some white noise in Audacity.

Anyway, I grabbed a 96 kHz test file, played it and saw the receiver light up at 96 kHz:

So now we know the software and hardware is capable. But what about that streaming music service?

pw-top still shows 48 kHz coming out of Chromium. Some searching online seems to indicate Chromium might have a 48 kHz cap, or not, or maybe it was fixed years ago. Or maybe Firefox works… so let’s try that:

Success! Firefox is playing 192 kHz audio and Linux is sending it to the USB audio card at 96 kHz.

… so, worth it? Probably not. Can I really hear the difference? Probably not. But I couldn’t find a clear answer online, so maybe this helped someone, somewhere, someday. Enjoy!

You might notice that the output sample format is 16-bit (S16LE), so we are likely loosing some precision and quality out the door.

For reference: This was with Firefox 133.0, Chromium 131.0, Kubuntu 24.04. USB Audio device is a “StarTech.com ICUSBAUDIO7D” (0d8c:0102) aka “C-Media Electronics, Inc. CM106 Like Sound Device” using the “Digital Stereo Duplex (IEC958)” profile.