Just FYI, “high res audio” is a fraud, a marketing gimmick based on pseudoscience. It is not physically possible to hear frequencies that high. A standard CD already captures everything within human hearing range and then some, after you’ve reached the age you’re likely to care about audio quality your hearing won’t even be able to reach that, and the vast majority of music does not make use of anywhere near the dynamic range supposedly offered by this “higher resolution.” All it does is waste disk space. It’s useful only in studios for purely technical reasons, utterly useless for the end consumer.
Unfortunately, this is misinformed and based on misunderstandings about sound, among other things. There’s nothing “pseudo” about the science, it is what is. While it’s true that humans can’t hear fundamental tones above a certain threshold (20K if you’re a kid, for instance), high frequency response is only part of what’s happening with high res audio. I won’t go into a lengthy discussion about it, but, as an example if you are trying to recreate a waveform, the more plot points you have, the more accurate that waveform is going to be. Higher sample rate = more accurate waveform.
Secondly, all music is extremely dynamic, and while most popular music is compressed and doesn’t make use of 120+ db of dynamic range (nor would you want it to), dynamic range isn’t the entire point. It’s the fact that going from 16bit to 24 bit gives you way, way more info: 16 bit = 65,536 possible volume levels, and with every bit, that number doubles. So at 24 bit, we now have 16,777,216 different volume levels. Further, the digital noise present in every digital recording (the “noise floor”) is moved even further into the background.
Anyway, maybe you don’t/can’t hear the differences - and I believe you absolutely could hear them given the right playback system - but that doesn’t mean the differences aren’t there or that other people can’t hear them.
***** Meanwhile ******
I got ahold of a download purporting to be the high-res release. It’s VERY weirdly different than all other versions I’ve heard of the soundtracks: thin, no low-end… not sure it’s legit, but if it is, it’s bizarre.