i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.
That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
When luxury earbuds became a fad, every major company pulled their high quality cheap ones off the market, and marked everything up. It caused me to panic because I loved a cheap ($15) Sony line that I would usually have to replace yearly, and when I went to replace them, they were gone. Every cheap good earbud was gone. I managed to find a case of the Sonys on Ebay shipped from Mexico, and have only gone through half the case since. I can compare, so I know how good (not $1K good, but good) they were. Most people can't.
you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who can tell a 320 apart from flac, except on some specially-crafted killer samples. a well-encoded 192 is often near transparent, but much more dependent on the genre / sample. pre-opus, 256 VBR was my go-to.
> that I would usually have to replace yearly
this is a foreign concept to me; i usually buy stuff that's designed to last, and dont mind paying for it.
Wine is similar. Most can tell a $5 bottle from a $20 bottle but $100 or $1000 is unlikely to be as discernible. Even the alleged experts fail blind tests. Some can even confuse some reds & whites in true blind tests.
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.