Wiim Ultra shows 24/44.1 on optical input

[Valentino]

What @Mr Ee wrote.
My early post in this thread:

FWIW my Yamaha CD-S300 also outputs 24/44.1 on optical and It's DAC is a Burr Brown that can do 24/192. It's most probably always running at 24 bits anyway since these Yamahas also can play files from USB input. Of course today TOSLINK can do 24/192 and maybe more. It was was originally limited to 20/48, but that's forty years ago.
Just for fun, a CD signal peak at -6 dB, presented as a 16 and 24 bit word:
16 bit: 0111111111111111
24 bit: 011111111111111100000000

The 16 bit music signal sample from the CD never touches those bottom* eight bits of the 24 bit sample sent by the CD player. Not very difficult to check for, but the check must be written.

*If those zeros were put on top of the 16 music would be terribly quiet, 48 dB more quiet to be exact.