Whenever I hear a debate on hi-res, I'm reminded of my younger days of ABX-ing lossy codecs.
I used to be able to tell 320kbps MP3 (LAME) on certain samples. MP3 has problems with short attacks, so
fatboy.wv always gets messed up, even in 2021. So I've always stuck with FLAC, and haven't really looked at lossy compression for 20 years.
I got interested in lossy codecs in the last few months for some reason, and I ran into
this sample from
this forum, which got me doing some ABX's with recent Vorbis and Opus. I can definitely tell the difference at Vorbis -q 5 (~160kbps) and Opus --bitrate 128 (100% ABX correctly). But it's more of "perceptable, but not annoying" variety. Bumping up the setting one notch, vorbis -q 6 (~192kbps) and Opus --bitrate 160, I can barely tell the difference (start to get one or two tries out of 20 wrong), and it's definitely in the "barely perceptable, not at all annoying" category. With most music, Vorbis -q 4 (~128kbps) and Opus --bitrate 96 is transparent to me.
I think all that means that lossy compression is a "solved" problem, meaning my flac collection is now perfectly overkill.
I've never been able to ABX a hi-rez file, even in my younger days.
Maybe you golden ears can appreciate hi-rez, but as far as I'm concerned, Apple AAC256 is perfectly fine for me in terms of format. These days, I care more about mastering quality (less dynamic compression, please), convenience, and interesting music.
Every hi-rez album I've tried has been boring as hell. Maybe the sound quality is amazing, but the music itself is dreadful.
YMMV.