[dstaley]

From what I've found, Netflix's highest quality audio is a lossy 640 kbps Dolby Digital+ (E-AC3) stream. For comparison, the highest quality BluRay audio would be the lossless formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. Both of these formats support variable bit rate encoding, and from my personal library I'm seeing average bit rates of 4727 kbps for Atmos TrueHD and 2525 kbps for DTS-HD MA.

[erichocean]

Dolby TrueHD is lossless, so the bitrate is somewhat irrelevant. DTS-HD Master Audio is also lossless, but "degrades" back to a lossy version if the decoding device does not support it.

The actual bitrate after decoding for a 24-bit 2-channel song with a 96kHz sample rate is 4.39mbps. With 5 channels, that's 10.975mbps (higher than a DVD for both picture and sound combined).

[dstaley]

FWIW, TrueHD also contains a lossy core (AC3 in this case), just like DTS-HD MA. I was also surprised to see that my TrueHD tracks are 24-bit, but my DTS-HD MA tracks are 16-bit.