A more comprehensive meta-study (
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296), combining 400 participants in over 12,500 trials reveals that there is indeed statistically significant difference, yet it is small, 5% at most.
I do not consider meta-analysis to be generally reliable.
I think one should always be very wary of meta-studies.
Oh, come on.
I am quite clearly in the "high res audio is pointless" camp, and I hate to play devil's advocate, but this is ridiculous. Meta-analysis is widely considered to be the best possible level of evidence in scientific research, and is routinely used to make important decisions in fields like medicine, where the consequences are literally life and death. This is not the kind of evidence that you can simply dismiss out of hand, especially on a website that is literally titled "Audio Science Review". Most people who try to defend high res audio (and other fringe audiophile topics) on this forum do so with extremely poor arguments (or even no arguments at all) and get laughed out of the room, and rightly so. This is not one of these cases. When you're presented with evidence like this, it should at least make you pause. Otherwise, you've left the field of logical, reasonable scientific enquiry and you've entered the realm of ideology. You've left the land of scepticism and you've entered the land of stubbornness.
If you want to criticize this study, then at least try to come up with specific concerns with the specific methods used in the study, instead of peddling "meta-studies meh" statements. That's exactly the kind of statement a science-denier subjectivist would make!
The study does show that people can, in fact, distinguish high res audio from standard resolution, and a number of the underlying studies report such a result even on real-world content (not just artificial test signals), which is fairly impressive. What the study also shows, however, if that people certainly can't
reliably make this distinction. For untrained listeners, the lower bound on the confidence interval is less than 50% success rate, which pretty much means untrained listeners can't tell the difference. Trained listeners fared better - [57.5, 66.9] confidence interval with a mean of 62.2%. This still means that even trained listeners have a really hard time - it's a really subtle difference, and keep in mind the stimuli used were probably hand-picked for this task.
This is actually not a bad result for the "high res audio is pointless camp": the study shows that the effect is so small and so hard to detect that there's really not much point in spending time (or money) on it, especially considering that the differences we're talking about are dwarfed to a huge extent by differences between, say, loudspeakers, headphones or room acoustics. In fact, it's so subtle that I don't even feel bad when I keep saying "high res audio doesn't make a difference", because that's consistent with the results of that study in the vast majority of scenarios (just not
absolutely all of them). I don't understand why people want to spend that much time and energy researching this topic to death, as opposed to, say, discussing how to improve loudspeakers. These are really messed up priorities. It feels like the debate around high res audio is being boosted by economic interests: it's trivial to make and sell (at a premium) high res audio hardware and content, but it's much harder to make a better speaker.
(As a side note… while
@Sergei did post the highly relevant story that I've just discussed, don't take that to mean I support most, or even some, of what he said in this thread. In my opinion, the evidence
@Sergei presented so far is mostly irrelevant. My personal favourite is the study involving
laser pulses(?) and
brain response(??) in
rats(???) for the purposes of assessing the effects of
blast pressure(????) from IEDs that soldiers in Iraq are suggested to(?????). Claiming that this is in any way relevant to the perception of high-res real-world audio content by humans is so far-fetched it's downright laughable.)
Technically, to be 'science' there has to be a hypothesis about why that should be otherwise it can't be taken any further. If people really were able to tell the difference, what would be the mechanism by which they were doing it?
Again, I feel compelled to play devil's advocate here… just because we don't understand why we obtained a given result does not mean it's not "science". Quite the opposite, in fact: lots of scientific discoveries were made because someone noticed an odd result that we have no explanation for. (Probably one of the most famous is the
anomalous procession of Mercury, among countless others.) In fact, I would even go so far as to say that unexplained results is what keeps science going - confirming existing models is great, but it gets boring fast.
Science is less about "why" than about discovering facts from which we can make predictions. Besides, before you can try to determine what is causing a given outcome, you need to make sure the outcome you're investigating is real and not just a red herring. If we discarded results because we don't know "why" they happen, I'm pretty sure you could throw the entire field of quantum physics out the window, for example.