Downvoted for saying "vast majority" instead of ALL? Sigh.
For ALL the listeners in this specific test? Yes, almost certainly. Naturally, just randomly picking a song, even one that subjectively sounds really good, and listening to 16-bit or 24-bit versions of it at moderate volume in a typical room will absolutely prevent anyone from choosing correctly with any statistical significance. The OP's test was doomed to fail from the outset.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to detect any difference under any circumstances.
16bit gives you an effective dynamic range of 120dB - noone, and I challenge to to prove me wrong, can detect differences beyond that. To quote from the last articel, that is enough to record the difference between a jackhammer and a mosquito in the same room.
> that is enough to record the difference between a jackhammer and a mosquito in the same room.
That is utterly laughable. Stated like someone who has never actually tried to record sounds with large dynamic range. But I suppose it's how you define "record". So if a mosquito is 40dBA, and a jackhammer is 130dBA, that's a difference of 90dB. Now I don't know of any preamp that has such a low noise floor, but assuming one existed, if we set the gain staging such that the jackhammer is 0dBFS, then the mosquito is peaking at -90dBFS. Thats 6dB above null, or ONE BIT. So your "recording" of the mosquito is one bit flipping on and off.
Quite the recording! Statements like these are what make recording engineers roll their eyes and think here we go again.
> 16bit gives you an effective dynamic range of 120dB
16 bit gives you 96dB of dynamic range. And less than that of usable dynamic range. You may say "effectively" as is, once dithered, but then you're accepting that the recording is done at a higher bit depth and then dithered down, thus refuting the original statement that 16 bits is enough dynamic range to record said sounds.
Dithering give roughly 120dB dynamic range in 16bit audio, that is the mosquito 30dB above the noise floor. That isn't ideal, but I struggle find a situation where it matters. If the volume is low enough for the jackhammer to not damage your ears, you wouldn't be able to hear the mosquito anyway. One could argue that if we had the audio equipment it would be nice to represent the mosquito and the jackhammer without gain control, but with all the dynamic compression we have seen the last decade, I doubt it.
For ALL the listeners in this specific test? Yes, almost certainly. Naturally, just randomly picking a song, even one that subjectively sounds really good, and listening to 16-bit or 24-bit versions of it at moderate volume in a typical room will absolutely prevent anyone from choosing correctly with any statistical significance. The OP's test was doomed to fail from the outset.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to detect any difference under any circumstances.