I've been going down the Hi-Res audio rabbit hole and learned how to buy from ototoy.jp (RIP my wallet). I ran across this comment for MacOS which was immediately applicable:

"The primary issue many don't realise is how Mac's are configured to play anything other than the standard 44.1khz/16bit output. To make this work, you must configure the output stream using the "Audio MIDI Setup" application found in the Utilities folder (from the Window menu, select 'Show Audio Devices', pick the output and set the Format to your choice of output). The maximum frequency is entirely based on the hardware capabilities. My 12 year old Mac Mini is quite capable of outputing from iTunes at 96khz at 24bit through the headphone out (which doubles as a digital toslink output) to my Pioneer receiver that can process the toslink input at 96khz/24bit. Has worked just fine for this purpose for years (and yes I've verified that the Pioneer is indeed processing 96khz/24bit data). Newer Macs can natively handle 192khz, though the toslink out via headphone jack was depreciated in more recent years, likely because few knew it existed."

Source: https://www.whathifi.com/advice/high-resolution-audio-everything-you-need-to-know

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always remember with modern music, just because the master was done and released at 96khz or 128khz… doesn’t mean the samplers or plugins used to make the music were running that high, nor are there external digital instruments that sync with DACs so as to take 96k full frame photos of a 96khz keyboard. There are productions now that are Dolby Atmos from day one, and musician/producers are starting to think about this, but for the most part except for hi-res tape conversion (which usually means an alternate master which may or may not have more love in it) its just high resolution images of already pixelated images.

Yes at the moment I just wanted to upgrade to CD-quality. My equipment definitely won’t handle anything more than that 😂

The Toslink/headphone output was always one of the coolest features of my macs. It's an unsung hero feature for sure. I have an unwieldy collection of optical cables of different lengths I've used over the years.