Yeah you do get some artefacts like that, particularly apparent on cymbals
That's usually down to incorrect encoder settings though.

Not sure what you mean by 'forced sampling of silence'?

mp3s work by removing frequency bands that are masked by other frequencies, because your brain will fill in the gaps afterwards.

The thing is they presume that your replay system is perfectly flat (which nothing ever is, outside a treated studio. Although they couldn't work from any other assumption). If you have perfectly flat 20-20k replay then it will sound fine, most of the problems are down to inconsistencies in the replay system rather than the lossy compression, if you see what I mean.

Psychoacoustics is a very interesting subject.
(Son of Sam-i-am We're all as mad as hatters here, Thu 12 Feb 2009, 12:00, Reply)