I treat claims that people can hear differences between lossless and high bitrate lossy compression with scepticism. I do not doubt anyone's sincerity, but it's unbelievably easy to fool yourself with audio signals. Expectations become reality even when the signal is identical. What you expect changes how you listen; and how you listen changes what you hear.
I own a pair of Focal Clear and on a number of songs the previous AAC encoding would exhibit artifacts and sound a lot less crisp.