[nsns]

It all depends on how sensitive you are to these things, I've done such blind tests, and to my ears the fall in quality was significant, even painful.

[sjwright]

If you had done such blind tests, you would have reached a different conclusion. Or, in the alternative, your hearing is orders of magnitude "better" than anyone else ever tested.

[gnud]

I think you're confusing lossless vs lossy with 192khz vs 44.1khz - in that case I agree with you, no percievable difference.

I can also hear differences between lossless/lossy encodings. If I tweak encoding parameters until I don't notice a difference, there is usually no real space saving afterwards - so why not go with lossess instead?

[stdbrouw]

Blind tests comparing lossless against what codec at what bitrate? How many runs and how often were you able to correctly identify lossless?

[spullara]

Audiophiles believe a lot of things with no evidence. How else could you sell them cables costing thousands of dollars? Reminds me of homeopathic medicine. The only reasonable use case for FLAC is archiving music you expect may need to be reencoded later.

[nsns]

Firstly, on a personal note, I must say getting heavily downvoted on a factual statement and not an opinion is a new and confusing experience for me.

My comparisons were made several years ago using LAME 320 CBR, LAME VBR, OGG, lossless (WAV) 16bit 44.1kHz and lossless (WAV) 16bit 48kHz. I believe at least most professional musicians and sound engineers would be able to identify the difference between all of these; while they might not always be "worse", their sonic character is certainly different.

[themihai]

Why to bother with various tradeoffs if you can get the best?(i.e lossless). You can make the same argument on video technologies(i.e HDR). The truth is that people usually adapt so "painful" audio or video quality stops being painful after a while.

[lisivka]

I confirm that I feel myself tired when listening low-quality audio even when I cannot spot any audible problems with audio. It's bland.

I.e. I will definitely fail ABX test, but I still feel difference. IMHO, ABX tests are wrong tests for that problem.