Erstwhile I've read an article somewhere which claims that listening to music continually in MP3 format is harmful for ears. Since MP3 is a compressed format of audio tracks, some sounds in tracks are deducted and eventually the size of MP3 file is reduced. As humans, we cannot notice the difference between MP3 (e.g. 320 kbps) and original audio track while listening, but in fact, our ears can distinguish. As a consequence, the article claims that if we continually listen to MP3, this results in losing the distinguishing capability of ears, and finally ears won't notice the fine differences between sounds anymore.
Is this completely true? Are we doing harm to our ears with our MP3 addiction?
And which digital format is closest to original audio? Is it FLAC?