I keep FLAC copies just so that I have lossless versions that I can convert into the lossy format du jour, but for actually listening, I mass-convert to lossy. I've listened to FLAC and properly encoded MP3 files (@192 and 160) on $50,000 audio equipment, and I can't tell the difference.
I'm curious, did you listen in a properly treated room? As in with bass traps, panel traps, diffusers, a cloud, first reflection points covered, etc? Because I can hear a difference on less that $10,000 of playback equipment, but in a fully treated listening room. And I know from the days when I used an untreated room, there would be no way I could tell in an untreated room, even with a million dollars of equipment.
It's the most overlooked part of the listening chain, and is in fact the most important part. In fact it always shocks me how many "audiophiles" will pump tens of thousands into audio equipment for their reflective, untreated, boxy listening space. A $1000 pair of speakers in a room with $5000 in room treatment will totally blow away $20,000 pair of speaker in a room with $0 in room treatment. Every time.
It was an audiophile who'd spent a small fortune decking out his "listening room". I imagine that he knew what he was doing.
I humored him by teasing out which one was which without him noticing, and then saying the lossless one sounded better. Didn't want to hurt his feelings. And really, the sound system as a whole sounded awesome. I just couldn't tell the difference between the formats.
To put it simply and honestly, you are not paying enough attention. There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps. But implying that 192kbps and 160kbps are sufficiently perfect is somewhat ludicrous. You can still hear noticeable artifacts on cymbals at 192kbps. They will sound like an absolute mess of warbling, and all of the audio will be imbued with a slight tinge of white noise.
There is a reason the mp3 scene moved away from 192kbps, and it doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth availability. It's because 192kbps sounds terrible.
>There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps
I can't on almost any modern music (which is the majority of what I listen to), but when I was going through the philips golden ears course, I did a fair amount of blind ABX on harpsichords, cymbals, and a few other instruments at v0/320kbps and didn't have much trouble identifying them.
Granted, at that point I had been going through something specifically intended to help train you for discerning differences in audio, but they were distinct enough I don't think I would have had any trouble beforehand, either.
On some stuff I couldn't immediately tell that some sounded better - just different. Though on some of the samples the FLAC was easily better to my ears.
(My criteria for a 'successful' ABX was accuracy of at least 8 out of 10 using the foobar ABX comparator plugin)
