It's fairly easy to tell between 192kbps CBR LAME and an original CD. 192kbps VBR is a bit hit or miss. High end gear can absolutely make the imperfections more noticeable.

Personally I just got fed up of the goalposts being moved around (LAME codec constantly being updated, mp3 scene switching from 3.97 -V2 to 3.98 -V0, etc.) and now I just have all my music collection in lossless.

~300MB a CD? No problem.

Basic DSP knowledge tells us that a digital audio copy is exactly the same quality as the original.

Also, testing the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3s over and over again is like drinking warm beer all the time to make sure it's really worse than the cold one.

Audio CD is an old technology. It doesn't have advanced error correction method. With poor quality CD-R, it's true that the quality is not the same.

Excluding from skipping and audible glitches that doesn't sound plausible.

i.e. copying an audio CD can create gross errors but not a more subtle change in audio quality (loss of dynamics/frequencies etc).

If you disagree could you point me towards some evidence?

Thanks so much for your last phrase.

I suppose if you use really crappy media and an even worse CD recorder you will have significant signal degradation because of all the bits missing so error correction is kicking in

But it's really a stretch