For me it's not about lossless sounding better. Storage is so cheap nowadays that it's silly not to have a full lossless encode for an archive/backup. I can transcode that lossless file into any other lossy format but transcoding a lossy file to another format destroys the quality.

It feels, for some-odd reason that us audio people have to justify our purchasing decisions and desire for quality and fidelity way more than people who spend hundreds of dollars on 21 inch 144hz monitors and care about things like frame rate and texture resolution do.

Or maybe not, but it's a feeling.

Enthusiasts complain about the crappy latency and refresh rates of modern LCD televisions all the time, against people saying "just turn on motion smoothing and most people won't notice." I'm not justifying one or the other, but it happens in both domains.

I suppose I'm glad I offered the caveat that it was a 'feeling', in that case.

It's pretty easy to learn to recognize mp3 pre-echo and no amount of good encoding will eliminate it.