Sample. 10 seconds only, as per Fair Use.

Yeah yeah I know I can't hear the difference between lossless and a well-encoded 128kbit opus/vorbis/mp3/aac/whatever lossy flavor of the day. But when I pay for music I want at least CD-quality, to be able to convert to said lossy flavor of the day - if could be bothered to convert at all, which I can't, with 64GB storage.

But all that is not the point. The N9 is very capable of playing 16 bit per sample stereo audio. These 24 bps tracks shouldn't be a problem: strip away the 8 LSB, and it's good enough. And indeed the N9 is capable of playing these files, but only mono. This isn't a hardware limitation, this is a bug. The question is: what is bugging, and can it be fixed.