Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of
  compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz
  audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and
  rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear
  preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at
  128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including
  a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise,
  in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated
  the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 -
  particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass
  hits, etc) rising over time.

  ... each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises.
  In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of
  sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said
  that they seemed to prefer “sizzle sounds” that MP3s bring to
  music. It is a sound they are familiar with.