mitchco said:
Measurements are meaningless if we don't know what is audible and what is not... And yah, there is a bell curve that would apply to most of us
Agree. There is a tool I helped worked on a few years ago located
here. The tool allows you to start with a reference wav file of your choice, and then it will introduce different types of distortion on-the-fly (crossover, bit depth, amplitude, clipping, TANH). You can set the intensity of each type of distortion, do ABX comparison on the wav, and then vote. After 10 votes or so, you can sign your result cryptographically and post it in a forum if you wish. And then others can take your posted result and see if it's valid or not. So it's not possible to overstate your skill
The aim here was to see if there really are people that could, for example, hear the difference between 20 and 16-bit material (I cannot). But if someone has great ears AND a great system, then maybe they can. And hopefully we could find these unicorns and study them more.
If anyone would like to try the tool, just download and unzip--there's no installer. Pick a high resolution wav file (try
here to get started), and then see how you do at reduced bit depth as a starting point. At a minimum, it's educational to learn what different types of distortion sounds like.