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If you can't hear the difference between mp3 of any bit rate and FLAC I would suggest that you are probably deaf and wasting your money on expensive headphones
That's pretty inflamatory. I assume you've done some double blind tests yourself?
It's possible to find some samples that mp3 at any bitrate can not make transparent. The codec has always had problems with certain things like transients and pre-echo.
It's also possible to jack down the bitrate far enough that nothing is transparent, and even simple music sounds wrong.
That said those are the extremes. Generally mp3 with a good encoder (read: LAME) around 192kbps or so sounds transparent to most people on most songs on most equipment most of the time. Double blind listening tests show this again and again. If you are specifically looking for it, you can sometimes pick out mp3 vs lossless/source, but it's very hard to do even on good equipment and you have to have a trained ear. That is, you have to have spent time learning exactly what it is that mp3 does wrong and look for it. Even then, if you don't have the source to compare to, it's usually very difficult to notice that anything is wrong.
I've found that auToV 5.7b ogg vorbis is transparent to me as low as q3 (about 118kbps) on the vast majority of my music. That's what I use for portable. I found this out by doing ABX testing and failing it.
If you can pass 10+ ABX tests of Q6 or higher vorbis or -v0 Lame, then more power to you. Congratulations, you've got better hearing than 99.9% of the population, and your prize is having to spend 10x as much on gear as the rest of us to achieve the same aural quality. Ignorance is bliss, no?
*Disclaimer: I do use LAME lossless on my home system simply because I have the storage space to do so and I can transcode it without worrying about artifacting.
