[mrob]

This. Your ears are not an oscilloscope. Lossy audio codecs are designed to exploit two major weaknesses in human hearing:

1. Poor sensitivity in bass and treble. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

2. Limited ability to hear multiple sounds simultaneously, or almost simultaneously. See:

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

Bernhard Seeber has some videos on Youtube with demonstrations of auditory masking:

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

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

The only fair way to evaluate lossy codecs is with double blind listening tests.

[Arech]

The problem with these weaknesses is that they are different in each human being. For me listening an mp3 is like a sanding an ear, while some don't even hear the difference between it and a live performance.

[jpc0]

> For me listening an mp3 is like a sanding an ear

There is such a broad spectrum in thr word mp3 that you need to be more specific. I can absolutely pick the difference between certian high bitrate mp3 encodings and wav files, however a different mp3 with exactly the same bitrate, effectively indistinguishable.

Bad mp3 encoding is a problem, not one I have experienced recently though. I think the bigger issue is people will rip a music video from youtube, then instead of extracting the existing audio stream into it's own container will reencode it. Mp3->mp3 encoding will be lossy just like any other encoder.

[mrob]

Can you ABX it?

https://abx.digitalfeed.net/lame.320.html

[concerndc1tizen]

I wonder how many people there are, that don't have these weaknesses.

And who are therefore forced to hear terrible audio because the compression method only considers the majority.

[mrob]

If people have notches in their hearing sensitivity at low or mid frequencies, sounds at those frequencies might fail to mask other sounds as expected. You could simulate this by applying notch filters to otherwise transparent lossy audio and seeing if it exposes compression artifacts. But I think this kind of hearing loss is uncommon. Normal age-related hearing loss does not cause any problems with lossy audio compression.