The pursuit of 'state of the art' in audio has changed a little I would say. That 99.999% of listeners can't hear the difference between audio sources has been true in the past as well, even in the pre compressed era. Most people listened to car radios and other lo-fi equipment.

Consumer formats aggravate the audiophile alchemists regularly. Looking through chat from a few decades ago about CD's versus vinyl, adjectives like 'hard' and 'brittle' crop up a lot. The solution technically, was of course to add more distortion, in the form of dithering, to provide an early form of psycho acoustic modelling.

Being a musician as well, I've taken a couple of online 'dare you to tell the difference' tests as well, while researching DAC's for mixing, but not under uncontrolled conditions. I put the top end through custom ribbons comprised of 4Kg of magnet focused on 0.001g of ribbon ( a crude description, but good enough ), and it's an observable difference.

Sitting outside listening to noisy wildlife of all types in the woods, I'm sure 100% of listeners could tell the difference between that aural landscape and any recording, including an MP3.