Sethares' music and psychoacoustics

All-
The Sethares book is about $70 from fatbrain.com, amazon.com and
abe.com,
but only $50 from tatteredcover.com No idea why the difference.
It is interesting that to my ears, the mp3 recording process is
harder on some
timbers than others, and some of Bill's timbres seem to suffer more than
those of
traditional instruments. Could it be that my ears are so used to
traditional timbres
that I "fill in" for the missing frequencies, while with new electronic
instruments, the
timbre plays a more memorable part of the piece so that I notice it more
when it is
degraded? Or rather, is there something about the mp3 process that
actually robs
inharmonic timbres more than simpler ones? Does anyone know of a site
where
they go into real detail about the mp3 process?
BTW, there is a sample of a truly magnificent gong (Chinese tam tam)
at http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/Inharmonic.html

--
John Starrett
"We have nothing to fear but the scary stuff."
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret/microtone.html