Interesting test! I used AKG K240 monitor headphones on a mobo sound card and could pretty clearly pick out the 2 best and 2 worst sounding encodings. The real kicker will be whether what sounded good to me was the highest quality encodings. Like others I ripped all my CDs to FLAC for a lossless copy that can be encoded to any other format without transcoding. I get the convenience of lower quality encodings, though, and I'll buy or stream lower quality from time to time for the same reasons I'll watch a movie on Netflix streaming instead of buying the BluRay.