Can you hear the difference?

I tried ripping a cd using foobar2000 to FLAC and to Vorbis (medium compression). I could hear the difference easily in the HF detail. In fact, Vorbis medium and Vorbis low compression (high quality) were differentiable also. Vorbis high quality was hard to tell from FLAC, but the file size was getting pretty big too.

Not to say it's critical. My favorite stream comes through on MP3 192, and it sounds very good, though the fact that it's always a modern quality recording (within a year or so I think) probably helps too.

The lower the bitrate the easier it is to tell the difference, that is no surprise. The question is if there is any point on the spectrum where lossy files cannot be distinguished from losslessly compressed files like FLAC. The BBC have done some research, and their conclusion is that at 320kbs few people if any can tell the difference. Of course, to test this, the method has to be double blind, and involve a sufficient number of repeats and participants to be statistically significant. However, all the serious reserach (rather than anecdotal) seems to confirm this. On the other hand, this will become increasingly irrelevant when bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. The BBC itself is currently streaming experimental broadcasts of losslessly compressed 16/44 FLAC files.

@timlub 

What makes WAV sound better than FLAC? Is it the fact that decoding FLAC impedes the flow of audio electrons from the computer?