Yes, I can hear the difference. When working in a small sound recording studio, I trained my ears to pick up on fine details. There was one day in particular I remember listening to a track, and wondering what the strange noise in the background of it was. I realized that I was hearing the audio artifacts from the mp3 compression.
Not sure how Mr. Young figures that a CD is only 15% of the master, though. A CD is pure uncompressed audio. If you recorded and mixed in 44.1k audio, then your cd is an exact copy of your master.