What I'm about to say here is a tangent to the article, but it's a fun experiment for people to try if they'd like to
One of the things I like to do is to listen to the same piece of music, using the exact same gear every time, but with the piece of music in various lossy and lossless formats.
So I'll start with a raw, lossless AIFF CD quality file or a 96/24 lossless master audio file. From that, I will create a lossless FLAC and/or Apple lossless version, 320kbps mp3 and/or AAC version, 256kbps mp3/AAC, and 128kbps mp3/AAC. And sometimes, just for fun, I'll do something like take the 320kbps AAC version and run that through an mp3 converter a second time to create a double compressed mp3 or AAC file.
Then I'll have them randomized by someone else and only labelled as 'A', 'B', 'C', etc. It's a single blind test where I have no idea which file format I'm listening to at any given time.
What I'll do is I'll compare two files at a time and I'll try to decide which one sounds "better" than the other. I'll go two at a time, putting one "above" the other until I have all of the files in the order that I think goes from the worst quality to the best. Then, I'll have the other person reveal which letters correspond to which files and see how I did!
The results I've had have definitely been different depending on the speakers or earphones I've used when running this experiment. I don't recall ever having a trial where I failed to put the lossy 128kbps version(s) at the very bottom of the list. I can pretty much always pick that low quality out of the pack.
The rest, though, have been a mixed bag. I pretty much always have a heck of time hearing any difference between the various raw, lossless and 320kbps versions. I pretty much always end up with them in a jumble up at the top of the list, with no real, obvious differences delineating which of the files I thought sounded "better".
The 256kbps files are where most of the difference seem to lie - at least for me. I've had cases where it seemed pretty obvious to me that the 256kbps version stood right in the middle in between the low quality 128kbps version and the 320kbps & lossless versions. But a few times, I've had a heck of time telling anything other than the 128kbps version apart from all the rest. And one time in particular, I recall with a pair of Sennheiser in-ear monitors that I actually put the Apple lossless version 2nd in line above the 128kbps version, had the 320kbps and raw files above that, and then had the 256kbps version at the very top as the one I thought sounded the "best"!
I honestly can't explain that one at all - especially why I thought the Apple lossless version sounded different from the 320kbps and raw versions. But for whatever reason, that's just the way I thought the order went that time. Very strange.
Anywho, I think it can be fun to sort of "test" yourself and various playback equipment with this method. Just going by what I tend to personally prefer in speakers and headphones, my preferences strongly correlate with the gear that had me putting the files in the "correct" order from most lossy to lossless, as well as where I heard enough of a difference between files that I put the 256kbps version in the middle without much trouble or hesitation.
