first: I have done this test myself many times in various ways, including recreating albums as a mix of 16bit FLAC and v0 MP3 (track by track, not within tracks), putting them on, and listening on speakers. I can tell sometimes, but the v0 still sounds great.

I was able to distinguish the 3 rock recordings with confidence, high frequency transients sounded more impactful in WAV. The Queensryche in particular has a lot of (well applied!) dynamic compression on the acoustic guitar and vocal which really brings out those transients.

However, if I heard the MP3 in isolation I would not detect anything was off. They all sounded good.

The Morricone and Vangelis I had no conviction either way and I guessed wrong both times. I suspect in their recording/mixing/mastering a lot of high frequency sound was lost anyway. In either case, I don't know if the CD master was made from original tapes or not. I know the Blade Runner OST has had a convoluted release history. Morricone has a 2004 CD master which is pretty well liked.

"Moving Pictures" was recorded to tape, but was notably an early digitally mastered album. Maybe that has resulted in preserved high frequency sound.

Compressed audio is great, I love it and I use it a lot.

I use CD Quality for archival purposes and my home library.. for most of the past decade hard disks have been inexpensive. I convert to Opus 192 for mobile devices.

Another reason for CD Quality archiving - I have a long term idea of recreating a CD collection. I want to get printable CDs and burn the audio/print the art because I want my children to have the experience of going thru a shelf or flipping through a binder, putting the disk in the tray, pressing play. I always loved doing that.

Again, could I tell if I transcoded a well encoded mp3 back to redbook? Maybe not consistently, but it's more likely the transcode of mp3 -> CD would introduce more audible problems than the encoding of WAV -> mp3.

Additionally, a lot of audio pipelines (even beyond the DAC - like amplifiers and similar) can end up with artifacts and harmonics in more audible frequencies - this is often more notable at extremely high frequencies (like 96khz and similar) - there's honestly nothing any human can actually hear near that range - but that doesn't mean it doesn't then affect audible ranges when actually played back on real equipment.

The big point is that "Being Able To Tell The Difference" isn't always the same as "Better Quality". You're often just replacing one artifact of the playback pipeline with another. Neither may truely match the original performance.

[0] https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/38109/lame-why-is-... - while not an explicit "low-pass" filter, the default option of "-Y" does something similar.

Once you hear the difference in sound quality / see difference in image quality you cannot undo it.

I have become very picky with display resolution and text clarity, and it has not served me well. I miss the days I was happy with a 1080p monitor.

because any of us from the late 90s/early 2000s who used the early versions of LAME will tell you in a second how easy it was to pick MP3 over raw, even at 320kb/s

When I first started encoding MP3s I used a 128kbps rate which is noticeably inferior to the original CD. I noticed this in the early 2000s when I would up listening to a CD of some music I usually listened to as a 128kbps MP3 and was blown away with how much more I heard.

I'd say that 192kbps is much better and the 320kbps that the author advocates is basically transparent.

Also, you can train yourself for what to listen for, to a point.

On the other hand, the only sample in which I didn't hear ANY difference is Ennio Morricone's, to the point where I couldn't really tell it apart from its 56kbit/s version.

Can the hearing be selectively bad for some frequencies within the standard 20-20000 range, and normal for the others?

I had Tidal many years back, and from the Lossless v Regular I only ever noticed a difference when it came to breathy sounds/etc. I did see that Tidal would burn through like 50GB of data monthly though.

Also - you may want to test some more modern recordings, the microphone/mastering quality of things nowadays is far better than what it was 2 decades ago (despite what some audiophiles may claim)