Sgt. Ear Ache
Major Contributor
I realize this thread is a year old, but I'm having a hard time understanding your above posts. You seem upset that there are cases where people can successfully ABX lossless and high bit-rate lossy encodings but it's not clear why.
It's because the circumstances under which it's been proven possible to discern the difference are pretty specific and actually require an effort to create and very few people actually can do so (and I don't necessarily believe everyone who thinks they can) while at the same time, the common criticisms of high br lossy on various audio forums blow the differences so far out of proportion to reality that it's ridiculous. Stuff like "Spotify is shit you need lossless for good sound" is a common mantra on reddit for instance. The reality is that Spotify Extreme is very good - for 99.9% of real world users under 99.9% of real world circumstances it's indistinguishable from Tidal.