We've sacrificed quality for convenience in a lot of domains.
MP3s are an obvious example. (Although many of us realistically can't tell the difference.) And many/most listen to music through cheap earbuds rather than expensive speakers/headphones.
Or take phone calls. Some may remember Sprint's hearing a pin drop commercials to advertise the quality of its network. Now, many of us don't even have landlines and just deal with the drops and other problems of cellular phones and IP video calls.
I can easily tell the difference using good headphones. You just need to know what to look for. Once you know, you can't help but notice. The difference is the transients, especially the cymbals and the snare. If it's muddy, you're listening to compressed audio.
When it comes to phone calls, I vastly prefer calling with Facetime Audio/Whatsapp/Messenger instead of the cellular network. The difference in audio quality is enormous.
Totally depends for me. There are days when my Internet is awful, days when my cellular is awful, and days when both are. Both are less consistent than when I had a landline.
New truth: at sensible bit rates, most people cannot differentiate mp3s and wav in double blind tests. New truth: at very high bit rates, almost nobody can.
And frankly, if you replace MP3 with a newer decent codec like Vorbis or AAC that doesn't have obvious glaring issues, "very high" isn't all that crazy high either.
That said, disk is cheap, and FLAC is easy piece of mind.
Yeah. I have a big bin of CDs in my attic, many/most of which I ripped as medium-quality MP3s. Realistically, given my so so hearing, I'm not going to go redo all those at this point--especially given that so much of my music listening is streaming at this point anyway.
That's true, but psychoacoustic compression models like MP3 work precisely because they're throwing out what most people can't hear. That said, people are different, and some people can hear the difference. My ears are probably only average, but my eyes are (or were) significantly "faster" than average: Until I was well into my 30s (fortunately, this has faded with age!), fluorescent lights were pretty much just like a disco strobe to me - as a teen I could literally see them flashing, even though the phosphors moderated it a bit. (The 2000's flirtation with those wretched CF twisty bulbs brought this roaring back, as almost all of them flashed enough to be really annoying to me.) Just like there are some (very rare) women who are tetrachromes, it's reasonable to expect that there are some with "golden ears".
The cool thing about Bob Carver was that he didn't just rely on his (obviously very good) ears, but also on his knowledge, intuition/insight, and equipment. Just amazing. Thanks to OP for this.
While he didn't rely on them that much other than as a confirmation, it clearly surprised the folks at Stereophile that he was instantly able to pick up on the subtleties they noticed.
MP3s are an obvious example. (Although many of us realistically can't tell the difference.) And many/most listen to music through cheap earbuds rather than expensive speakers/headphones.
Or take phone calls. Some may remember Sprint's hearing a pin drop commercials to advertise the quality of its network. Now, many of us don't even have landlines and just deal with the drops and other problems of cellular phones and IP video calls.