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by mrob 768 days ago
Audibility of error (and sound in general) depends on what other audio is playing at the same time, with both frequency domain and time domain effects:

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

Here's a two-part lecture with audio demonstrations by Bernhard Seeber of the Audio Information Processing Group at the Technical University of Munich:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk

A simple weighed frequency domain error calculation is not very useful for comparing lossy audio codecs, because effectively exploiting auditory masking to hide the errors is a major factor in codec quality.