There's something about the really low tones that simply... changes at lower bit-rates. High-frequency tones are somehow clearer when uncompressed. It feels like the tones are right, but the waveforms distorted. Your rippling lake MPEG analogy is pretty much spot on.

That being said, age, tinnitus and amazing progress within the audio compression sciences have made it more difficult for me to separate uncompressed WAV and 320 kbps MP3, though the 320 kbps files in the article had noticable artifacts in most cases.