Yes, that’s what my listening partner and I hear. A few other listeners are piping up that they’ve made this listening comparison and have come to similar conclusions.
As noted, my objective in publishing this article on mixing in Pure DSD256 is to share: 1) that it is possible to do this, 2) that some recording/mastering engineers are currently doing it – so it is a real-world capability, and 3) that you can download the comparative file samples and listen for yourself. My hope is that some additional folks making recordings in DSD will try this and perhaps adopt the process for their workflow on recordings where it might make sense.