I agree; I believe it to be the case that even when provided with an immaculate audio consumption setup, fully wired, insulated, abyss headphones, some insane s

I agree; I believe it to be the case that even when provided with an immaculate audio consumption setup, fully wired, insulated, abyss headphones, some insane schiit amp and dac, a perfectly silent room, let the listener pick the songs, the full nine yards, maybe 1% of the population could correctly discern a stereo lossless track from a stereo 320kbps more than 50% of the time over many songs. Genetics plays a role in getting into this 1%, but the far, far bigger cause is really just experience: Its having listened to the same tracks over, and over, and over again, until you've literally learned where the imperfections in this specific 320kbps encoding of this specific song are, rather than imperfections natural to the codec itself. That's the "dirty secret" of lossless audio: If you ask even someone in this 1% to do the same thing, but for music the experimenter picks and that they've never heard before: that 1% literally becomes 0%. Maybe there's some gigahuman audio codec engineer employed deep in a basement at Dolby HQ who knows exactly the classes of imperfections that AAC encoding imprints into tracks and also has superhuman ears and such... but its damn close to 0 humans who could do this. What this says about why anyone cares that AM, Tidal, Qobuz, whatever offer lossless audio, or that Spotify doesn't, is certainly interesting. It does seem like a tremendous waste of bandwidth and local storage, to me. But, I totally and fully subscribe to the message of the original article: It matters to me that this quality is maintained, that it exists for those people who do care about it, and that what I am consuming is as close as possible to what the original artists intended (rather than letting a bunch of cooks into the kitchen with opinions about which hertz are more important than others).