Comment by pja

Might be interesting to try AAC or Ogg Vorbis & see if they're any better. In these days of ever increasing cheap portable storage carrying a bunch of flacs around isn't quite as nuts as it used to be of course.

(Cymbals seem to be a particular bugbear for mp3 encoding; cymbal-heavy tracks tend to suffer the most from obvious encoding artifacts once you know what to listen for.)