Are Audiophiles "Simply Guessing?"

1. There is a lot more to music reproduction than just the high frequencies. Speed, decay, tone, pace, spatial cues, etc. Listening ability and experience may be more important than acuity and frequency range in determining “quality” of reproduction.  That said, it is possible or even likely that different age ears find different presentations more pleasing that others.
2.  Agree ability to distinguish differences in sound reproduction is equipment dependent.  Which is essentially the purpose of this site.
3.  I have found some 128kbps music files sound more pleasing to me than double that because of the remix for the lower resolution, but that is highly track dependent and I definitely could hear a difference in any case.
4. Generally I find I like the sound of higher res digital music files better than redbook or mp3s, and find they sound closer to good quality vinyl than lesser res digital files, and this is listening across several different systems.  YMMV.

kn

Alan Parsons worked at multimillion $ facilities with original recordings that are far better than what most audiophiles ever listen to. So I guess his attitude was that for recreational listening there was no point to compete. 

I think its similar to many aspects of work recreation life. many people that do something for work don't do it for relaxation-recreation. I used to love working on cars then I owned an auto performance shop now I hate working on my car... sort of ruined my hobby for me having to do it every day all day. I'm betting Alan P has a similar type of situation.

Also that ’Mastery’ is more than simply deliberate practice (aka the 10K Hours Rule / Malcomb Gladwell).

If we were to follow Gladwell, many audiophiles would be experts given the amount of time spent listening. One problem with this is that technology is marching on and keeping up with it, even within our very specific hobby, isn’t as feasible or as practical as some believe it to be.

Surely that test should only be done streamed through a mega dollar set up, with loudspeakers, not cheap? headphones. As we all know the more you spend on your equipment the better the sound quality.
Perfect pitch? so what.