I recall an offhand comment from a source I can't remember¹ that some people when presented with mp3s encoded at various bitrates and flac encodings of the same song preferred low-bitrate mp3 above flac above high-bitrate mp3. The person theorised that it was because the low-bitrate encoding had more noise, which gave the sound additional texture. I draw an analogy with dithered palette images which can look different, but better, than full-colour images.

¹ Yes, this is the ultimate in unreliable anecdote, sorry.