Originally Posted By: Janice & Bud
I’m curious as to the outcome of hard research (double blind studies) on the differences audiophiles can hear when it comes to all of the above.

There's long been a difficulty with this, in that many audiophiles, if they don't get the outcome they expect, will proclaim that there must be something wrong with the experiments/tests.

I've had people claim that they can tell the difference between .wav and .flac, but if you decompress a .flac file to a .wav, you can then do a bit-for-bit comparison between the original and the wav->flac->wav copy and they are identical.

Not so with mp3, ogg-vorbis, et al. They definitely do degrade the sound, though at the highest quality compressions, most of us would struggle to hear the difference. At high-compression/low-data rates, most of us can tell the difference.

This is compounded by the fact that it can be demonstrated that some surprisingly subtle changes are detectable ... the effects of certain types of capacitors, for example.

The amount of care needed to set up a different-media comparison would be huge and it may well prove impossible to completely eliminate something like the RIAA equalisation effects from the comparison, which would invalidate the rest of the test.

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts
BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.