[skrebbel]

You can test this. Get a bunch of audiophiles in a room, play various recordings from various media (24KHz wav, mp3 at good bitrates and encoding settings, bad mp3, ogg, CD, vinyl etc) without showing them which is which, ask which one they like the most and see if the results correlate with the supposed quality of the source.

I don't have a source ready but this has been a hot topic in audiophile land for decades and tldr is they'll pick out the really bad sources (eg <128kbps mp3) but not the rest. Basically the results look like those from a blind beer tasting test: no correlation between winner and supposed quality, except if the quality is especially bad.

I'm no scientist, but to me "audiophiles who really care about this stuff can't pick out the good MP3 from the uncompressed original" is sufficient proof that MP3 is, actually, based on a sufficiently well-understood model of human hearing.