My headphone rig was always optimized for a nice guitar sound, and I would second that. The sound of fingers on the string and the "pluckiness" of the guitar is

My headphone rig was always optimized for a nice guitar sound, and I would second that. The sound of fingers on the string and the "pluckiness" of the guitar is what gets lost. Beyond that, the specific thing that i noticed gets lost is bass character on some tracks. Ex: Some drum and bass tracks just don't hit at low bitrate. This aspect sometimes feeds into the low guitar strings though, where they might have a bit less body. Lastly is of course sound staging, but that's something that a headphone setup is very sensitive to. As for quality differences, I basically fall in line with the consensus on this thread. FLAC and 320 are indistinguishable. 192khz is almost always indistinguishable and good enough, although there are some situations where it might be slightly noticeable. 128 is pretty easy to tell the difference with the good setup. There is also the rare track with amazing production and or very cool stuff happening somewhere in the spectrum, so I don't entirely write off someone wanting a plus one on the take above. "I absolutely love this jazz album. It's been a large part of my musical journey as a human, I can a/b test this at 320, but for this album, I really want it lossless." I can respect that. I got to know some of my test tracks pretty well (ex Black Sun Empire & Arrakis for bass), and while 192 was fine for other tracks, I wanted 320 or lossless on those.