> On the contrary, it proves that some audible information is stripped from an MP3 file, even at highest settings, and this stripped detail inevitably adds more

> On the contrary, it proves that some audible information is stripped from an MP3 file, even at highest settings, and this stripped detail inevitably adds more information to the sound stage. It wouldn't be there if there was no contribution. It doesn't prove that at all. Our perception of sound is quite complex. Sounds that would be very noticeable in isolation can become inaudible in combination with other simultaneous sounds, or even sounds that came shortly before. MP3 and other lossy compression schemes use a psychoacoustic model that takes all kinds of things like that into account. A - B being audible does not mean that A and B can be audibly differentiated. Perception of sound is not maths. > Moreover, as per the study published in Audio Engineering Society in 2016 [0], MP3 changes the emotional perception of the songs, again verifying there's audible differences Yes, as I said, listening tests are what we should use as datapoints. Not mathematical differences between the waveforms. That being said, in this case I see the study uses MP3s with bitrates of 32, 56 and 112 kbps. Is that a serious study? Those are very low bitrates for MP3! The authors of the study picked the lowest bitrate nearly indistinguishable from the original sound (i.e. already not perfect by their own admission), and then picked two bitrates even lower. No wonder the test subjects are going to hear a difference. Nobody is going to argue that those MP3 bitrates should be considered good quality. Any result obtained at these low bitrates is completely irrelevant for compression with even moderately decent bitrates (let's say starting from 160 with a decent encoder such as LAME). I don't really care one way or another whether people can hear a difference between lossy compressed audio and the original (for me, with my ears and on my equipment, 192 kpbs MP3s are already more than good enough). What I do care about is the use of proper methodology.