Compression kills the high end, and learning to recognize tell-tale compression artifacts will forever ruin your ability to appreciate streamed music, low-bandwidth wireless audio systems, or just 320kbps rips of music, certain genres faring worse than others.
I know that in grade school, part of the requirements for joining band, due to the size of my school and overwhelming demand, was passing an audiometry test, where we were evaluated on a few different contexts related to ability to discern detail in audio, such as pitch and volume. I remember being pulled away into the principal's office where some of the test administrators were present, and they accused me of cheating and demanded to know how I did it.
Apparently, I was the only student in the entire state to get a perfect score on that test, at least for that particular year. Unsure if they were implying I was the first ever, but that seems ridiculous to me because passing the test boiled down to just paying close attention.
So I really don't know. Maybe the average person can't hear it, but I know just what to look for in the high-end and usually guess even 320kbps mp3 correctly from my own self-tests wherein I would randomly select between different encodings of a music file. I'm confident I would do well in an administered ABX test if I'm simply being tasked with finding the difference between mp3 lossy encodings and a lossless reference.
I had an experience I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, about hearing a difference between 24bit 96 kHz and CD-quality in a sound studio. I don't know whether the operator screwed up or what. It doesn't mean I don't think CD quality is "good enough". But that's not the same question as "non-discernable".
On the other end, I have had a few encounters with satellite radio (SiriusXM) and I cannot understand how that product exists. In each car I've encountered it, I've had a visceral reaction and wanted it turned off after a few minutes of trying to listen to it. It put me somewhere between anhedonia and dysphoria.
There are a ton of people in the audiophile world who swear that knowledge of what you’re listening to makes a physiological difference and therefore it’s not the placebo affect. It’s insane, but then so is most audiophile marketing.
You shouldn't conflate that with things like telling the difference between a 44.1KHz and 96KHz sample rate, which is bollocks.
That said, it's a good practice for any archivist to source the highest quality digital versions of albums possible, in case they end up befriending or needing to barter with aliens with much more sensitive ears.
The question is can you hear those differences, to which the answer is basically no, for a modern codec at high enough bitrate. "enough" is 128kbit or more in blind listening tests.
No one here is arguing that modern, high-bitrate codecs aren't much better at producing imperceptible artifacts. But 128kbps is absolutely not enough in blind listening tests, 128kpbs typically produces a ton of perceptible artifacts. You're just making that up.
To a “trained” ear that is listening out for the differences? Sure, those are perceptible. But those aren’t normal people.
AIUI there are some things that don't go away at any bit-rate, e.g. pre-echo.
It may be that two different people have different results of being able to tell the difference due to physical differences, no matter the "effort" the put into listening, or training.
But most of the time that's intentional, as high frequencies you "can't hear" just waste bits that could be used on something more useful, or even cause noise from aliasing and harmonics, as no actual playback equipment is perfect. And extending the frequency range makes it much harder to design the circuitry. All for something you can't hear :P
It's another reason why high frequency (96khz) playback is kinda useless, or even make things worse, as the extra frequency range that gives cannot be heard by humans anyway, and just gives more opportunity for those higher frequency patterns to cause distortion. It may even be that people can "tell the difference" precisely because of those distortions. But that doesn't mean it's "better", indented, or even get the same result on different playback equipment.