The interesting questions to me:
- Can a difference be heard?
- If yes, are people able to reliably identify A vs B (as in, can people identify whether it's A or B rather that whatever they listen now is not the same as the last they heard)
- If they can identify a difference, which sounds better to them?
- Do different headphones give different results?
- Same question with headphones vs speakers?
There are absolutely huge differences between budget consumer and high-end professional equipment. There are also huge differences between high-end audiophile and professional equipment - the former being designed to flatter and enhance the sound, the latter being as neutral as possible.
A good few years ago a high-end audiophile CD/DAC maker was caught deliberately rolling off the top end on their equipment to make it sound smoother and "less digital."
It wasn't accurate, but a lot of people liked the sound enough to pay five figures for the boxes they made.
Professional audio has a different goal. The aim is to create a mix that "translates" - sounds good on as many different systems as possible, from budget earbuds to audiophile.
For a long time studios used a pair of shitty Yamaha bookshelf speakers called NS10s next to their ultra-expensive reference speakers. NS10s were almost the worst speaker ever. But if a mix sounded good on the NS10s, it sounded good on anything.
The question of preference, though, is what matters, and that's where I am now firmly convinced lossy compression is fine for me: the sort of differences that I could hear made zero difference to my enjoyment of actual music.
After all of that, though I had double blind evidence I could hear a difference, I knew I didn't really care about that difference. I couldn't even describe the difference - it was almost subliminal. And that was with a harpsichord, which is a known difficult sound to encode. I've been a lot more comfortable knowing lossy encoding isn't destroying my music enjoyment since those tests.