[Applejinx]

As another professional audio engineer, I've done it, and to do it I tuned in on 'personality' aspects of the sound, knowing that the rough frequency response would be pretty much taken care of.

The degradation is much like what you'd get running the mix through a generic digital EQ imposing some subtle but high-order filters, or going through the mix buss of an unexceptional DAW that's doing a lot of bit-shuffling to get to the output, perhaps with some unnecessary gain changes.

These are shitty if you have seriously good monitoring and care about ambience and soundstage depth and subtle emotional cues or shades of texture. Sooo… not exactly 'OMG, super obvious on earbuds through iTunes with the aural exciters on'. That stuff will wreck the sound MUCH worse than -v0 mp3, no argument there.

If you're working on gear where you'd be able to tell the difference, and you have experience with listening for the specific objectionable qualities of lossy audio, then you can hear the lossy audio even at its best.

Otherwise, the cure for bad sounding mp3s is to do 'em 320K and call it a day. Throwing more bits at it does definitely help. It's not hard to get mp3 over the threshold where other parts of the playback system harm the sound worse.

[Arbalest]

Even if you can tell, the question is, why fixate on it? As you say, the changes are far more subtle than getting a cheap set up. Most people do not live or commute in anechoic chambers. For myself, I'm happy to 128k opus or -v1 lame it, which arguably may still be overkill

[ObsoleteNerd]

When you go from SD to HD video it's hard to go back. Same again when you go to 4K. Same again when you start eating higher quality foods. Same again when you start driving nicer cars.

I'm sure there's a technical name for it, but for a significant number of people, once you get used to the higher quality it's harder and harder to go back down a level.

[Arbalest]

I would counter that once someone goes from a common, well engineered brand to a less common, expensive, and equally well engineered brand, they'd have a hard time going back. You only need to look at clothing brands to see this everywhere. Not all differences are functional in the way that you have drawn the comparison.

[arvinsim]

I disagree. It's all about adaptation. Sure, if you step down to SD from HD, it will be hard. But if you are forced to watch SD always, you will eventually adapt to it again.

[Applejinx]

And why would I ever want to do that? Sounds pointless when I don't have to.

[Aperson4321]

Some people got this thing called sensory overexcitability, it makes sensory things be more intense and detailed for them, and it probably makes some of them really appreciate the extra quality in FLAC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexcitability

Not many people got sensory overexcitability so a/b testing with random selection might not show those peoples opinions.

Its like saying most of humanity can't read JavaScript code so JavaScript is a completely shit programming language that are only used by stupid uninformed mindless coders who don't understand real programming, and that they are too lacking in intellectual ability to realize that and move over to a real programming language.

And also some music just does not work in low quality, it just turns into noise.

[Arbalest]

A rare condition probably shouldn't be compared to something which can be learnt and practiced. Given how people can form strong opinions derived from what other people say, I would wager that most audiophiles do not fall into this category. Citing an exception doesn't invalidate the common case.

While it may be the case that the direct parent of my post may have this, they still pointed out the differences were minor compared to pretty much every other technical factor at play in the digital to ear pipeline.

[stuaxo]

I remember having a copy of "busdriver imaginary places", where he does a lot of fast rapping, once I got the CD it was suddenly much easier to understand him.

Not sure if they were 320k though.