I am also unsure of weather or not I am using pulseaudio by default. I haven’t installed any other audio related packages, just curious what the default is.
I checked the discovery wiki but I did not find the information there on sample rates to be relevant.
Both my DAC and my sound system support upwards of 96khz and I think default is 48khz.
If I don’t have either .conf file, will creating one be read by pipewire?
Ex:
/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf)
Yes i see the folders are empty on mine also. There is the file in /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf
I think that is the defaults? Just not sure where you change them? 
I’m thinking you have to create the files as it shows. 
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Changing_the_default_sample_rate
Seems so:
"To do this make a new file in
~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/10-rates.conf
with the following contents:
# Adds more common rates
context.properties = {
default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 44100 48000 88200 96000 ]
}
It seems there is a basic guides section in the freedesktop page for the package:
Simple guides
Thanks for your assist! I will write back if this fails.