Talking about wives, women have evolved to have a slightly different sound perception then men, with a slightly better space perception when it comes to the higher human voice pitches. It must have been of use when we were evolving as a tribal species and a given woman had to differentiate the exact timbre and location of her child among all the other tribe children in order to come to rescue. Don't take this as a deterministic point of view, please!
As for the ED12, it sounds weird indeed, and I guess your ability to differentiate lossy vs lossless might have to do with its somewhat bloated and echoing midrange - it might help revealing pontual differences in a frequency range our ears are very sensitive to, hence they should help telling the difference between the same two recordings with different levels of compression. But do you agree that the ED12 is a good IEM for music appreciation, or for some kind of music style in particular? I personally find them very unnatural - even disturbing - in the way they deliver. Voices, for instances, sound almost unhuman. Wood instruments like clarinets and oboes, lose their characteristic timbre.