On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 7:27 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett@wdtv.com> wrote:

Your ears are probably the best tool. Some hear well, and some do not.
I am amazed at the number of people who cannot tell if mp3 has ever been
in the mix. To me its obvious, when your ears get tired of it, and want to
"change the station" in just a minute or so, its been an mp3 at some
point.

For crying out loud, stop this nonsense!

It is established without any shadow of a doubt that the overwhelming majority of the population CANNOT tell the difference between a reasonable bit-rate encoding in mp3 format and the original PCM data. This isn't up for debate.

Reasonable bit-rate means 256kbps; by the time you reach 320kbps even expert listeners have a very very hard time differentiating the mp3 from the PCM in an ABX test.

By all means talk about low bit rate encodings and how they are no good, but please folks - double blind testing doesn't lie, and the double blind tests are close to unambiguous at this point.