I've heard that some people actually like - LIKE those compression artifacts in their songs. They like the 'sizzling' sound, though personally I considered it more of a watery sound, but that kind of thing is sickening. I don't go near 128kbps or less mp3 unless it's a podcast with discussion.
192 is a gray area because it can sound like garbage or it can sound like it's actually a higher bitrate than it is - depending entirely on what was used to encode it.
Dolby Digital surround tracks are the same - 448kbps is the standard, but some DVDs offer 384kbps for a 5.1 presentation, and usually it's all-too noticeable especially in the rears - and I like 'aggressive' surround mixes so I often paid extra attention to that.
Few years ago I 'disassembled' my Titanic DTS CD so I could make my own versions of the score with just center channel music (meaning the album has no synthesized choir) and just rear-channel music (meaning the electronic chimes are more expansive and the music has a heavier, wetter sound) and also because I was never happy with how quiet the rears were in relation to the front three channels so I boosted them to match more closely, making it a more immersive listening experience and I also downmixed it into a new stereo CD which was better mixed than the actual stereo CD.
At the same time I never found it - and this is after listening to individual channels and pairs of them - to have any kind of noticeable compression artifacts at all. Like full-bitrate DTS DVDs, the quality was stunning.
It's interesting that DTS-HD Master Audio is quickly taking over Blu-ray, forcing Dolby TrueHD out to a degree. I suppose the benefit of that is anyone who doesn't have the means of listening to the HD audio formats gets the full-bitrate DTS over standard Dolby Digital, though many do have the maximum bitrate it can do, which is 640kbps.
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