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Personally I like lossless for practical reasons (e.g. conversions without quality loss).
Obviously for the author's signal source, the original CD sound tracks (sampled at 44.1 KHz * ) would limit the importance of a change from 128 to 320 kbps. * Corrected units
No, this is wrong. CDs are sampled at 44.1khz with 16-bit samples, making for (calculates) 706kbps. And that's ignoring stereo.
To be specific, a 44.1 KHz sampling rate provides a bandwidth of 22.05 KHz, period, full stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samplin...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_rate
A quote: "The full range of human hearing is between 20 Hz and 20 kHz.[3] The minimum sampling rate that satisfies the sampling theorem for this full bandwidth is 40 kHz. The 44.1 kHz sampling rate used for Compact Disc was chosen for this and other technical reasons."
* Corrected units
I personally break even at V2.
Try doing the same test with some orchestra recording or any metal band of your preference, even 320 vs lossless would be noticable.
Anyway, with the cheap headset I have at work, yeah, I didn't notice any difference.
Asking which file sounds "better" is meaningless; some distortions sound good. The proper way to do this is an ABX test, where you compare both to a known original, and ask which sounds more like the original .
You just need to focus on percussion to get it right - it's much more complex frequency-wise. I personally break even at V2.
If you have quality headphones I don't think it's very hard. On earbuds, or laptop speakers, almost impossible. Put it on a real stereo and you will also be able to. Perhaps the fact that music is now being produced and optimized to sound good on tinny speakers is altering what we perceive to be a "good sound."