of course you can so long as you know the bitrate before listening to it
but anyway, like every industry, there is a lot of money to be made so long as you can convince folks there is a difference between 1 thing and another. folks pay thousands for a bottle of wine, yet can't tell the difference in a blind test over a $3 bottle from the grocery store. folks pay tons of money for beats headphones, only to get the same inner workings as a $20 walmart set, yet they will swear they can "hear" the difference. folks pay a lot for "high" settings in a game just to swear there is a difference. and folks drop paychecks on an expensive watch that tells the time no differently than a cheap timex.
sadly the one thing you can really tell the difference with folks won't spend the extra cash for. they'll drink the cheapest swill beer they can get their hands on despite it tasting like week old urine filtered through a muddy, moldy work boot.
go figure. but hey keep spending big on that placebo, they need the cash to develop the next perfectly acceptable mid-range card for the rest of us to enjoy