@Grayson Peddie
With few exceptions, it's doubtful your human ears will be able to pick up the lost artifacts of files encoded to MP3 @256 and above, even when compared head to head against lossless FLAC or WMA lossy or lossless -- or dare I say, WAV and AIFF in all their fattened, bit-by-bit glory.
YMMV against those last two master formats however.
Beyond the source material, it's the quality of the encoder - and techniques and tricks employed - that counts for more than anything else, and not the audio format per se. Using top flight playback equipment can help differentiate the negligible nuance differences perceivable in the various formats. Classical music also favors non-compressed formats due to its more demanding dynamic range.
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