I'll not even pretend to know what you mean by "anti-fact". Are you claiming I didn't hear the artifact, that HD radio is perfect? Wow. Even I don't believe that! Everybody (stations, listeners, manufacturers) is learning. When something is obviously amiss, and audibly so, it's important to point it out, and try to figure out why.
My guess is a combination of aggressive compression/limiting combined with Neural-type pre-processing. The aggressive processing will push what would have been low-level details forward, where they're more likely to cause artifacts from low bitrate coding. Neural-type pre-processing would tweak the incoming audio in an attempt to prevent these types of artifacts. In my experience, splashy, sustained highs...like cymbal crashes and tinkly bells, is where artifacts are most likely to show up with music...so it makes sense that these are the types of things that pre-processing would attempt to "correct" before encoding. Just a guess. Got a better one? A REAL one?
