Well, you're half right

It's not elitism, but for different reasons.

"Ignore some of the subtle elitism inherent to this conversation -- the encoder you're using is probably more than adequate for excellent sounding mp3s."

But why not suggest to him the best FREE (as opposed to the others you mentioned which may require registration, I haven't used them in years :P ) encoder, which just happens to have better sound than the pay encoders?

I find nothing elitist about that. EAC+LAME, or W2L+LAME is a great combination. I used to use the Fraunhofer codec with Sound Forge to encode, and this really does seem to sound better. Of course, that' s my elitist opinion, so i'm biased