it's not just the high and low bands that are outside of your frequency range, it's also a fairly large amount of frequency bands that corporate pop producers cut out on purpose. so, it's actually very true that you can't tell the difference if you're listening to celine dion or taylor swift or something - because the production process intentionally cuts out the frequencies that the mp3 removes, which is why the mp3 removes it.
but, if you're listening to abstract techno that's mixed by non-professionals (or professionals that don't know better), anything labeled "classical" or "jazz" or even interesting psychedelic or progressive rock then things actually do exist in those frequency bands - and i demonstrated the point when i posted that ping-pong effect, which the compression algorithm just demolished. you will lose a lot of music with an mp3 if you're listening to these types of music because they weren't mixed with the corporate pop techniques that the mp3 compression is designed to take advantage of.
so, the process is like this:
1) corporate pop producers eliminate specific frequency bands, because they get in the way (and can't be produced on am radio, for example)
2) the designers of the mp3 algorithm realized that and took advantage of it. so, they cut out the same ranges that were cut out during the corporate pop production process. they call this "psycho-acoustics", which is just a pretentious term to describe what i'm describing.
3) creative musicians then come along and they don't cut those ranges out when they're producing their music.
4) somebody uses mp3 compression to compress these songs, unaware of what i'm trying to explain to you.
5) large amounts of the music disappears, and they don't understand why.
a good rule of thumb is this: if the music you like is released on a major record label, it probably doesn't matter if you use mp3 or flac. but, if you're listening to anything that is remotely interesting at all, you're really better off avoiding any kind of lossy compression - because the mp3 algorithm didn't intend for you to use it to compress the music you're listening to.
and, i'm an expert on this topic - you're not.
so, i hope that's clear.
