The degree of difference depends on the kind of music you listen to. Live recordings of acoustic ensembles in airy cathedrals -- in that case you can tell the difference. On tracks that have a highly produced studio sound, where everything is an electronic instrument -- not going to be much of a difference.
I tried doing tests like this and I could not find any recordings where I could tell the difference at 160 kbps VBR. I not saying that it is impossible, but the conditions must be pretty rare and the difference very minor - compared to the massive degradation that come from room effects it amounts to nothing.
compared to the massive degradation that come from room effects it amounts to nothing.
Truth.
Chamber music in an echo-y cathedral. With bad encoding, you can hear a noticeable difference in the length of time the reverberations are audible and and the timbre of those reverberations cab be quite different. With lots of acoustic music, the "accidental beauty" produced by such effects can be quite important.
Finding this convinced me to re-encode my music collection in 320kbps MP3 for anything high quality, and algorithmically chosen variable bitrates for lower quality recordings -- usually around 160 kbps. That was quite a number of years ago, though. I'd probably use another format today.
