Not OP, but just a random ex-audio guy who did his fair share of listening experiments with different formats and bitrates.

FWIW, it had the complete opposite effect on me. I stopped caring about things like flac or other lossless formats for general music listening.

If the only way to maybe sometimes pick out a 320kbps mp3 from a flac one was to be on my best headphones, in my quietest room, focusing all my attention... the difference doesn't matter for practical listening. My ears may just be garbage, but it made me skeptical of people who make bold claims about what minutia they can discern -- although magical claims are more prevalent in the audiophile world ("these cables sounds great!") than the actual audio production world.

Not an audio professional but I'm the sound guy for a nonprofit.

Along similar lines, I can't tell the difference between a $250 microphone and a crazy expensive mic in anything but ideal conditions -- and even then, I need to hear them side by side.

+1; there are so many more important factors before the smaller things start making a very noticeable difference. A Neumann U 87 into a 1084 or VoxBox will sound marvelous with good talent giving a great performance, but that performance would still sound damn good with a $100 Shure SM57/58 into a Focusrite interface costing about the same. It’s never been easier or cheaper to be able to make music that’s good enough to get plays on Spotify.

Buying a Ferrari won’t make you Michael Schumacher, but he could probably lap your car round a track faster than you ever thought possible.

>does it ruin your appreciation for great music in lower quality formats?

As someone that has high-end gear, I can absolutely tell the difference in most cases between 320kbps MP3 and lossless when switching between the two versions of the same song. It's hard to put a finger on, but it just "feels" different to my ears/perception. However, after listening to exclusively one or the other for a few minutes or not A/B switching the same song, I have a much harder time detecting the difference.

Quality of the master and quality of the equipment matter much more, IMHO.

+1, I think for those with even a little musical background, the brain fills in the details to a much greater extent, especially if it’s something you’ve heard before on a good signal chain / live. You know what’s there, so you know what to listen for, and your brain kinda just interpolates the rest.

This is not my idea btw, I read it somewhere, just forgot where I read it. Googling a bit around “musician audio quality ‘fill in the gaps’” didn’t ring any bells. I’ve been reading up on acoustics and audio engineering over the past year trying to get my personal music project together, so it may have just been from a book as well.

Psychoacoustics and "perceptual audio coding" are the search terms you were looking for, here's a couple of links:

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/psychoacoustics-how-percept...

https://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/1222-mp3.html

http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/GZ05/05-music-coding.pdf

Not at all, but I do have much greater appreciation for the time that sound engineers took to cram as much frequency information into the fixed size spectrum box using level variation, panning, parametric equalizing, and compression. All of those things we had to listen for and critically evaluate in that class.