Audio perception is highly subject to placeo effect. If you're curious the community at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums

Audio perception is highly subject to placeo effect. If you're curious the community at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/ has worked very hard to make this a more rigorous scientific process. It's pretty remarkable how good modern lossy encoders are really. I consider it one of the more impressive feats of software engineering of the last decade.