There's a lot of great data here, and the author obviously tried to cover all of the bases. Unfortunately I'm still bothered by a couple of aspects.
Firstly, the question of "can you hear a difference" is completely orthogonal to the question of "which do you think is 24 bit". By using the answer to the second question to infer an answer to the first, you're entangling them. If someone could reliably hear the difference but on half the songs they preferred 16 bit and on the other half preferred 24 bit, their own answers would cancel each other out.
Secondly, all it takes is ONE PERSON who can reliably tell the difference [1] to prove that the difference is audible, even if it's only to a very small subset of the population. The test was structured to detect the abilities of a group, not a single person. I'm perfectly willing to believe that as a group, people on average can't tell a difference, but that doesn't tell me whether I can tell a difference.
[1] Reliably telling the difference would mean being consistent on double-blind A/B testing, repeated enough times to achieve statistical significance.
Firstly, the question of "can you hear a difference" is completely orthogonal to the question of "which do you think is 24 bit". By using the answer to the second question to infer an answer to the first, you're entangling them. If someone could reliably hear the difference but on half the songs they preferred 16 bit and on the other half preferred 24 bit, their own answers would cancel each other out.
Secondly, all it takes is ONE PERSON who can reliably tell the difference [1] to prove that the difference is audible, even if it's only to a very small subset of the population. The test was structured to detect the abilities of a group, not a single person. I'm perfectly willing to believe that as a group, people on average can't tell a difference, but that doesn't tell me whether I can tell a difference.
[1] Reliably telling the difference would mean being consistent on double-blind A/B testing, repeated enough times to achieve statistical significance.