This. Your ears are not an oscilloscope. Lossy audio codecs are designed to exploit two major weaknesses in human hearing:

1. Poor sensitivity in bass and treble. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

2. Limited ability to hear multiple sounds simultaneously, or almost simultaneously. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking

Bernhard Seeber has some videos on Youtube with demonstrations of auditory masking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk

The only fair way to evaluate lossy codecs is with double blind listening tests.