But: while it's still available, it's about ten years old, and I have no idea if it still runs on modern hardware.
I think of how mpeg video cannot accurately portray looking at a rippling lake.. the sinusoidal motion does not have much in common with blocky mpeg.
The overtone movements become disassociated and start splitting up into disconnected sine wave blocks. Transients also become softened.
With MP3s this is obvious at the high end, while lows/mids sound passable. The compression algorithm has more frequency bins at the high end, so the damage is more obvious there.
There's also a loss of low-level detail. Reverb tails lose definition, and the music loses front-to-back depth.
That being said, age, tinnitus and amazing progress within the audio compression sciences have made it more difficult for me to separate uncompressed WAV and 320 kbps MP3, though the 320 kbps files in the article had noticable artifacts in most cases.
FWIW, it had the complete opposite effect on me. I stopped caring about things like flac or other lossless formats for general music listening.
If the only way to maybe sometimes pick out a 320kbps mp3 from a flac one was to be on my best headphones, in my quietest room, focusing all my attention... the difference doesn't matter for practical listening. My ears may just be garbage, but it made me skeptical of people who make bold claims about what minutia they can discern -- although magical claims are more prevalent in the audiophile world ("these cables sounds great!") than the actual audio production world.
Along similar lines, I can't tell the difference between a $250 microphone and a crazy expensive mic in anything but ideal conditions -- and even then, I need to hear them side by side.
Buying a Ferrari won’t make you Michael Schumacher, but he could probably lap your car round a track faster than you ever thought possible.
As someone that has high-end gear, I can absolutely tell the difference in most cases between 320kbps MP3 and lossless when switching between the two versions of the same song. It's hard to put a finger on, but it just "feels" different to my ears/perception. However, after listening to exclusively one or the other for a few minutes or not A/B switching the same song, I have a much harder time detecting the difference.
Quality of the master and quality of the equipment matter much more, IMHO.
This is not my idea btw, I read it somewhere, just forgot where I read it. Googling a bit around “musician audio quality ‘fill in the gaps’” didn’t ring any bells. I’ve been reading up on acoustics and audio engineering over the past year trying to get my personal music project together, so it may have just been from a book as well.
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/psychoacoustics-how-percept...
320 kbps mp3 vs lossless 16bit WAV (cd quality) is extremely difficult to hear the delta without training, but if you know what the source instruments are supposed to sound like, such as hats and you can focus on their frequency band, you can hear compression artifacts and comb filtering.
This course really changed how I take in music and sounds in general.
[0] https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1