Compared to the many anti-scientific audiophile articles, this one was quite decent. A bit that bothered me was the description of how the encoders work. It me

Compared to the many anti-scientific audiophile articles, this one was quite decent. A bit that bothered me was the description of how the encoders work. It mentions the discarding of frequencies, which is not entirely correct. The only real discarding of frequencies happens with the lowpass filter that is typically applied as a pre-processing step, not the actual encoding. The encoding of the frequency components happens with coefficients, which are quantized (coarsely encoded), not zeroed. This introduces noise to the signal, which is weighted against the computed masking threshold, driving bit allocation to the different frequency bands. As for the format recommendation for people ripping their own CDs, I'd say stick to a lossless format for storage at home. That way you're future-proof. For mobile use, make encodings from those files using whatever best lossy format is available at the time.