Above 192kbps, it really depends on the material.
I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps pretty easily, but anything above 192kbps is pretty difficult to distinguish from uncompressed audio. Yup, I could easily hear the difference, but I’m also using $100 headphones and a pro-sumer DA.
Unfortunately I can't access the full articles, however here's the abstract of a very relevant article, emphasis mine. There is a distinct difference, however whether it's perceivable, and how much, depends on many factors. Rick Beato has a great video on this topic, which I just discovered on YouTube: Audiophile or Audio-Fooled. The quality will always remain very high.". Mellow rap can go much lower and loud heavy metal can result higher bitrates. This results in a very high quality VBR MP3s, giving you bitrates around 200kbps, depending heavily on the music.
* "Current consensus is that settings "-alt-preset standard" are recommended for most cases.
The biggest difference seems to be not in 160 vs. For earbuds and car listening it doesn't really seem to matter. I can hear a very slight difference most of the time between LAME-encoded (-alt preset standard*) MP3 files and CD audio, but only on an expensive system with terrific speaks in a quiet room. I myself took a similar test and failed as much as I succeeded in identifying which track was which (160 vs 320), a result which is no better than random guessing. Capping the bit rate at 160Kb/s in MP3 files can be pretty harsh on a track, but allowing the bit rate to wander upwards during more complex passages-as variable bit rate encoding does-and throttle down during quieter sections captures an astonishing amount of complexity while keeping file sizes down to an impressive minimum. Some follow-up testing confirmed our suspicions: variable bit rate encoding makes a tremendous difference in the audio quality results, certainly enough to justify-many times over-the slight file size increase.
It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.
Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. Here is one surprising result, from an experiment described in Maximum PC's article " Do Higher MP3 Bit Rates Really Pay Off?":