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Old 11-11-2017, 02:45 PM   #39
Judders
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by karbomusic View Post
Oh wait, this isn't the right conversation or claim, this is about 320kbps MP3 vs 44.1k and you'd be right since I've never found anyone who could reliably tell the difference between CD and 320kbps IIRC. In that respect, I'd take issue with massive reduction in quality beacuse CD is the standard for this purpose (public consumption) anyway.
I've found it depends on the source. Some things you can (particularly when concentrating on the stereo image) and some you can't. Sometimes older recordings sound higher quality to people as mp3 because the encoding distortion adds some high end excitement! They are certainly very close and often indistinguishable though.

I recently did an online test, and shared the results with a few people. About 1/3 of the clips were reliably identified, and about 1/5 reliably misidentified, but if you took the total scores of each test it would appear to be random chance. Not in any way a big enough sample to be statistically significant, but once you hear something you can't un-hear it, if you know what I mean.
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