Set your audio sample rate to 96000k on Ubuntu

Open a terminal, navigate to /usr/share/pipewire, we're looking for the pipewire.conf file.
Backup your pipewire.conf file in case you mess up your audio, you can recover the state

cd /usr/share/pipewire
sudo cp pipewire.conf pipewire.conf.backup

Then edit the `pipewire.conf` file as root. You need to set the following properties uncomment this 

# default.clock.rate = 44100

change it to 

default.clock.rate = 96000 

My best guess of what to change for bitrate is to uncomment this: 

#link.max-buffers = 16 # version < 3 clients can't handle more 

And change it to

link.max-buffers = 24 # version < 3 clients can't handle more

Then reboot. You should see your changes take effect, and if you run pactl info you should see 96000Hz as the sample specification. 

$ pactl info 
Server String: /run/user/1000/pulse/native 
Library Protocol Version: 35 
Server Protocol Version: 35 
Is Local: yes 
Client Index: 199 
Tile Size: 65472 
User Name: seb 
Host Name: golem 
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.0.5) 
Server Version: 15.0.0 
Default Sample Specification: float32le 2ch 96000Hz 
Default Channel Map: front-left,front-right 
Default Sink: alsa_output.usb-AudioQuest_inc._AudioQuest_DragonFly-00.analog-stereo 
Default Source: alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo 
Cookie: b039:4497

That's it! you should have it set a higher sample rate if your hardware + software can support it! Other thoughts on audio in ubuntu Honestly, the GUI in ubuntu seems to be lacking. This should be OS functionality. I looked into the pavucontrol package, but that just gave me a GUI for devices and mastering levels. Background for this was I got my hands on a audioquest dragonfly external dac, thinking it would improve audio recordings on the garbled lenovo DAC. The audioquest does not record, it is only an audio output. Nevertheless, I wanted to max out the audioquest's supported 96000Hz 24bit audio, and then as you can see in the image, the LED turns from blue to red on Ubuntu same as when I had it configured that way on windows!

Here's how I tested it on windows 7:
The windows Speaker properties editor hasnt changed much, but it does get the job done here. The dragonfly changes LED color based on the set sample rate. 44100 Hz was green, 48000 Hz was blue and 96000 Hz was red. I'll share an image below. Anyways that's all, I feel like I can hear high frequency sounds more crisply on certain songs, but it's probably all in my head.
 

A reddit post for cross reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/pipewire/comments/10smi87/how_to_change_sampling_rate_and_bit_depth/