NPR Article - Can You Hear Difference Between WAV and mp3?

[Sidney Crosley]

I'm not sure if any of you have seen this, but NPR had a side-by-side test of several songs to see if you can discern which of the samples is an uncompressed wav, a 320 kbps mp3 and a 128 kbps mp3. 

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

As someone who is neither a full on audiophile, but not a complete amateur either, I set up my DacMagic to my Macbook via USB, and listened through my NAD amp on Grado SR125s and Superlux HD668. I got 2 out of 6 correct, while picking 320 kbps twice and 128kbps twice. And honestly, I was never overly confident in my choices. 

Has anyone else tried this? Thoughts on the process? I'm guessing that the nature of streaming audio like this is flawed in the actual test.

[ntslash]

Got six out of six using my kindle. I could see how people would be tricked by this. The mp3s sounded louder on almost every song. But the WAVs were easy to detect because they actually sounded clear.

[213041284s]

I got 5/6. I didn't have any problem at all picking up the differences between 128 and 320 kbps, however it was definitely trickier telling what was 320 and what was WAV, esp on the Coldplay track.

[jhog3411]

This was a good little test.  I picked the WAV correct 4 out of 6 times and the 320 kbps the other 2 times.  To me it sounded obvious which was the low quality mp3.  I was listening through low quality mini bookshelf speakers.  I imagine the difference would be huge on my home system.  That said, if I'm out running or using it as background music, the quality doesn't matter that much to me.