Nah. I don't bother with that. I can't listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I'd say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.

Almost no one can, or have equipment that can make the difference. That being said, the difference between an old mp3 and a new one is sometimes noticeable at the same bitrate. The encoding algorithm has improved a quite lot since the late 90s. I bet a lot of people who say they hear the difference think about those old encodes.

I keep flacs as a master format that I make new encodes from when I want it on my phone and such though.

Opus/ogg @256 sounds at least as good as mp3 @320.