Can you tell the difference between lossy and lossless audio?

Yeah better executed than others I've seen. My phone isn't great. I'll try again through my dac amp.
 
4 out of 6, but genuinely couldn't hear any difference, although I do when I mix my own stuff

saying that, the 2 I got wrong, I suspected they might be right
 
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It all depends on the degree of compression and what has been done to compensate afterwards - often compressed music sounds a bit dull afterwards, and that can be partially compensated by some compression and EQ work. My Nephew used to own a minidisc player that compressed as it recorded, and comparing compressed and uncompressed it was impossible to not hear the difference.
 
Yes I could, but Susanne Vega and Neil Young both sounded better on Vinyl! Having spent a lot o time playing with HI Fi I think people get too hung up on quality and forget it is about enjoying the music. Just my opinion. The better the system the worse poorly recorded music sounds, to the point that I have music that only gets played on the car stereo cause it sounds so crap on the home system.
 
I think it's very dependent on the music, not all hi res files are equal. I remember reading somewhere that older music is better as albums were recorded to be listened to at home. I think this is true. Some of (to me) the best sounding Hi res files are, The way it was - Art pepper, I've this in 1 bit dsd, sounds amazing, also Queens greatest hits in 192/24 is astonishingly good. To me there definitely can be a huge difference between hi res and non hi res files.
I've just orderd a set of Dunu DN-2000J IEM's to use woth myiBasso DX80, anyone have any experience of these ?
 
Through the built in speakers of my desktop, 1/6. Since I mainly listen to music in the car (not an ideal "stage"!), the convenience of compressed music outweighs any extra perceived quality of sound and I doubt my abused ears could tell the difference anyway.
 
I have heard some compressed audio that sounds awful then decided to discount it all and have all my audio in flac. Maybe I was a little hasty to write it all off.

I'm fascinated with audio and all the long withheld perceived wisdom i've picked up from hifi mags over the years, that I'm now constantly questioning (to put it politely) The likes of What hifi give you nothing in reviews that i would consider important like what DAC/amp chips are used and actual amp performance and speaker frequency response measurements testing you just get a least of vague hifi buzz words like veiled, glassy etc...

Give a what hifi reviewer £2k to buy you a cd sourced system they would buy a £600 cd player, £600 Amp, £600 speakers and £200 on cables. I would put money on you getting a better system by using what ever optical reader you have in the house already like a dvd player or old cd player as a transporter and spend your £2k on some active speakers with a high quality built in dac.
 
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I am a big digital music fan, mainly SACD runing through a Marantz HD-DAC-1 and Sennheiser HD700 headphones.
I also go portable with an Astell and Kern and Shure IEM 535s.

I simply go with how an individual rip sounds mostly but have found some of the higher defininition rips of older music can sound very flat.
a company called HDTracks in the US of A do a service for record companies remastering the very old stuff from origonal tapes and some is very good and some downright awfull.

A lot of fold do refer back to the golden days of vinyl and say the sound was better but it was just different. When CD came out the stuff was tweaked to make the most of the medium.

my fave stuff is usually the 24bit reruns coming out a lot nowadays, for me that is as close as it gets.

going back to the OP i agree that it is hard especially as ears get older. most of the sound kicked out is high frequency that cannot be heard.

I can only just tell the difference between FLAC and 320 WMA files......just
 
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