The best way to think of lossy encoding is as really smart dithering that
tucks a lot of quantization noise away into parts of the waveform where it
can't be heard. Excessive signal processing, limiting and saturation simply
leaves  lots less space to hide the artifacts. Excessive levels will clip
the filter bank that is an integral part of the process making things even
worse.
	
Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN
Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control
Over 40 years making people sound better than they ever imagined!
615.562.4346 http://www.bobolhsson.com http://audiomastery.com

-----Original Message-----
From Tom Fine: 
... it seems to me like a lossy format defeats a lot of the good being
advocated. ...