[mihaig]

I laughed when I first heard someone saying that it's unlikely to hear any differences between a FLAC and an MP3 at 320.

After all I got some DSD and flac files and they all sound excellent to me. Can hear a lot of details and nuances. An MP3 that is 10 to 50 times smaller cannot be that good, right?
 
Then I took some DSD files (5k+, multiple songs and converted them to MP3 at 128kbps). Used Foobar with ABX plugin + Fiio X3 ii DAC + Fiio K5 amp + Sennheiser HD800 headset.
 
Truth is - when I don't know which one is playing, MP3 as 128 and DSD at 5k, they all seem identical to me... I cannot hear any difference at all between them. 

 
It's worth saying that I tested my hearing (online) and although I have almost normal hearing (I can hear sounds at quiet levels) I seem unable to hear anything above 16khz. Could be this the reason why I cannot hear any difference? Because MP3 compression affects mostly sound above 16khz, that I can't hear anyway?

 

[Slashfury99]

The only difference when comparing between the two for me, is that the DSD sounded slightly more dynamic than the MP3, and that is when I manually switch between the songs several times around the same parts. If given a blind test, I don't think I can confidently identify the difference either, though I have never tried it.

I personally think this is more beneficial than harmful. If MP3 files sound the same as DSDs—disregarding psychoacoustics, wouldn't it be better to be able to store much more songs in a single drive, i.e. a single 256GB microSD, than expanding that storage to the TBs for the same amount? Most, if not all my music stored digitally are at least ALAC or FLAC, and they take up quite a lot of space in my home NAS. It's not very cost effective when the numbers go to over a few thousand.

But I guess having a bunch of DSD music also increases bragging rights.

 

[Currawong]

I have quite a bit of DSD the quality of which I don't find to be that good. A lot of it would have started as PCM in the first place anyway, and if that wasn't well recorded and mastered, then there is no possible benefit IMO.

 

[mihaig]

I agree it's beneficial. I started to rip my old CD collection because now I know I don't need super high resolution music files to enjoy the best audition

 

[akg fanboy]

modern DSD is really just fake resolution, and a higher sampling rate isn't exactly more resolution either as sampling rate doesn't determine the quality of audio file itself. You're not going to benefit from the sampling rate that far exceeds human hearing unless you are a bat, that's just a physical limitation of humans even if dsd had the true resolution it claimed. Most if not all people would fail a blind test conducting 16 bit flac vs 24 bit flac with the identical masters. As far as human hearing range goes, I'd go as far as to call dsd inferior to flac
 
http://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/dsd-vs-pcm-myth-vs-truth/