It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between, say, AAC @ 256kbps and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes people with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of those few who can, they generally can only tell by listening to very the specific characteristics of the specific encoder used, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between, say, AAC @ 256kbps and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes people with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of those few who can, they generally can only tell by listening to very the specific characteristics of the specific encoder used, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.