These aren't songs I normally listen to, but I did this quiz just now and even with laptop speakers I picked 3x uncompressed, 2x 320kbps MP3, and 1x 128kbps MP3.

128 is usually pretty easy to pick out, once you know what to listen for. There's no soundstage. They just sound flat.

The tricky part is distinguishing between 320 and uncompressed. 320 is pretty darn good. Even when I can hear the difference, if it's not a song I'm familiar with, I can't tell which one is better. It's just different.

Ha. That was interesting. I got 1/6, though out of the 5 I got wrong, I picked the 320Kbps MP3 for 4 of them. This backs up a few blind tests I did when I was younger, though then with music I was familiar with: 320Kbps MP3 and uncompressed WAV were typically indistinguishable to me, and, when they were audibly different, I still couldn't say which was better and which was worse.

The one I got completely wrong was the Jay Z track. Even re-listening knowing which is which, I still can't tell the difference :( - but this is a style of music I rarely listen to, and maybe that's the reason.

It's also a fair few years since I was 30, and that could be an alternative explanation.

(I'm actually quite surprised I did as well as I did, as the 128Kbps versions weren't obviously worse, and it did take a few listens on headphones. I should probably do another blind test with a 2003 build of LAME or whatever, not so much to compare MP3 vs WAV, but more to measure how much my hearing has deteriorated over the years...)

Ha, I just picked 5/6 the 128Kbps tracks. Maybe my ear has become accustomed to the compression artifacts and misses them when they're not there!

This is apparently a thing, that people will prefer what they’re used to and these days that’s low bitrate audio played through phone and laptop speakers...

I question how often people regularly listen to music through laptop speakers. Isn't it mostly through earphones or headphones?

Not necessarily, lots of students don’t speakers hooked up to their laptops, abd I see kids listening to music on their phone speakers all the time

This was fun, thanks for this.

Doesn't that test just intentionally choose bits of music that are hard to discern?