Yep. People will pay for it even if there’s only a perceived benefit. Everyone who has hung out with audiophiles has known at least one who is convinced they can hear the difference. But if that person was tested in a blinded format would they actually succeed?

Lossless music is great. As an archival tool, to transcode into something smaller on your actual listening device. It’s not a technology designed for streaming or listening in today’s world.

> But if that person was tested in a blinded format would they actually succeed?

I always think of that famous coathanger post: https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-...

And the immediate nitpicking following it: "Is your speaker system time coherent?"

Meh. Some people might truly be able to hear the difference. A very small amount. I have some visual perception differences, even participated in a Stanford study on high fidelity visual perception.

Example - on a 2880x1800 15" screen up to 10 feet away, I can see a quarter pixel (subpixel, really) difference in position. Can also tell a 3% difference in HSL values. New colleagues like to "test" me to see if that's actually true by moving something by 0.25px to see if I can actually tell, and I always can.

Being pretty good at visual design/ having freakish perceptual abilities lead me to meet a lot of music producers at the top of their game/ musicians that sell out stadiums, etc. I've tried testing a bunch of them on lossless versus lossy. Something like 2 out of 5 of them can repeatedly tell the difference.

That said, all but three of those people said they can't actually tell the difference unless they're paying really close attention. One of them, one of the top grossing producers of all time, said lossy compression gives him a migraine.

Just saying that dismissing ANYONE having the ability to tell the difference seems inaccurate. Though I'd bet the number of people, globally, who can tell the difference numbers in the thousands

I’m not contesting there is a difference between lossless and lossy audio in specific instances. It’s small but sure, I’m sure some people could tell. My contention is with the “Hi-Res” audio (which, for Apple, means 24-bit and 192 kHz sampling rate).

Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, will be able to hear a difference, assuming there aren’t mastering differences in the tracks. If you take a 24/192k track and downsample it to 16/48k, nobody will be able to tell. Ever.

I've been doing a bit of research on the limits of human vision today, as I was wondering if any ancient humans (say, at Newgrange) would ever have been able to discern the spiral of a galaxy with their naked eye...

According to what you're saying, I think it's just about possible. M51's spiral features are 20 arcseconds, and you can apparently resolve 15...

And turns out M51, the easiest spiral galaxy to view, would have been directly overhead Stonehenge (the best viewing position).

So... Might be somethin' for you to try, if you ever get somewhere extremely dark and perfectly clear?

M51: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22m51%22&t=ffab&atb=v340-1&iax=im...

Newgrange: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=newgrange+spirals&atb=v340-...

Can most people not see the sort of briefly appearing cloudiness/ cloudy streaks of light (idk how to describe it)/ galaxy arms in the sky, if you're in the middle of a forest/ with no light pollution??

I think people can see the milky way in the right conditions alright.. We know from ancient records that people could see it as well.

As far as I can tell though, making out the actual spiral features of another galaxy is generally assumed to be impossible... And I don't think it actually is, for someone like yourself.