[newdude116]

This magazine did a test with mp3 https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html

The only one who was significantly able to tell if something was mp3 encoded or not, was a guy with a hearing damage who loved punk music. In fact, mp3 was developed for persons with normal hearing. So it is well possible that he was able to tell differences where other people were unable to.

[Applejinx]

Maybe the punk music had more to do with it. Sounds like the guy was keying off of subtleties of sonority and emotive quality which are a lot more fragile to digital processing.

It's quite easy to overprocess a digital audio file and wind up with something that is pristine as far as frequency response, but flat and 'pod people' like as far as emotive cues and intensity. Aliasing and cumulative losses to word length issues have a lot to do with it.

It's VERY easy to make digital stuff accurately represent frequencies like 2 Hz or 35kHz that our ears don't hear. It's a lot harder to make the digital stuff perform in the midrange when our perception can go, inconsistently and irregularly, waaaay beyond what we're used to thinking of as the limits.

[oriolid]

I did some personal experiments back in the day when hard disks were expensive and found that the compression artefacts show up first in distorted guitars and cymbals, then brass instruments and everything else survives much lower bit rates. So that could explain why the punk rock fan hears the compression problems first.

By the way, the lossy compression algorithms don't try to produce exact frequency response but to leave out stuff that humans wouldn't hear anyway and compress the rest.

[em500]

That's the original German version of the article which was translated in my hydrogenaudio link.