PokeParadox said:
Also yes Vinyl captures the full sound, but all of the frequencies are captured meaning there are many frequencies which are redundant due to the limitations of the human ear. The developers of MP3 and AAC take that into consideration and throw much of the redundant frequencies away. Yes their judgement of what may be considered redundant might not suit all ears, but they are continually refining this based on blind audio tests.
You are wrong there

I assume you, as a programmer, are fairly knowledgeable in the field of physics? Therefore you understand the concept superposition? Well, even if you cannot directly hear frequencies above the 20Khz threshold, the waves above the 20Khz threshold can superpose the waves below the threshold and thus actually can have an effect on the audible sound. Simple physics.
OK, you have me there and that is certainly something that never occurred to me before and it certainly makes sense in terms of interfering waves. Regardless of theory, to me it simply makes no difference, I cannot perceive any difference from audio I encode at 170kbps AAC or 180kbps VBR MP3. I could very possibly drop the bitrate lower and it would still sound perfectly fine to me. In addition the comment about blind audio test holds.