Originally posted by PinchyCM
i ripped a copy of that song off my CDs this time, and i still think i can tell at specific points, maybe the placebo effect . i asked my roommate, and he says he can tell a difference, and i didn't tell him which was which. i used a frew tracks off the evanescence cd btw, a great selection to show off the range in the klipschs. but whoever says they can't hear the diff between 160 between 320 is deaf. if you know anything about sampling, even if encoded right, you lose quality. i mean, you take a continious signal x(t), you take points from it discretly -> x(k),from a fixed interval T, and you lose parts of it. oh, and i have fantastic hearing.
The point that was made was this:

Yes the format is lossy; however, there shouldn't be any audible distortion as a by-product of this. At certain bitrates, the differences between the reference source and the mp3 become inaudible. Having good hearing and hearing things that aren't physically possible are two different things.

Some people have noticed differences between songs ripped at 192 kbps and the reference, but not anyone that I've heard of has noticed any audible differences between any 200+ kbps bitrate mp3's that are properly encoded and the reference source. This is people using headphone systems like HD 600's with meta 42 amps.

Unless you have freakishly accurate hearing, you shouldn't be able to hear this. Even 'freakishly accurate' is an understatement.