this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I've done a handful of those online "tests" where it's a 320kbps mp3 and flac or wav clips.
I could almost always tell the difference. The prob was that I would think the mp3 was the higher quality one. In a friends group years ago, another friend of mine had similar results.
A lot of those "tests" also are strategically designed such that the bitrate of the 320mp3 isn't saturated enough to run into bitrate aliasing. A lot of people, myself included, sometimes lean on flac because we have heard it make a difference, and it's so shitty that we just go to the higher quality when we want archival quality versions.
Also, if you start introducing eq or other processing for various reasons, when you start magnifying sections of lossy, or even lossless audio, you can start hearing missing data or compression artifacts.