[acdha]

All recordings have loss, nothing unique about digital in that regard. The point I was making was simply that once CD quality (16-bit, 44hz) became mainstream and only modestly more expensive hardware could get into 24-bit / 96khz range you were past the point where almost anyone – even trained “golden ears” listeners — could notice a difference from further improvements in that regard. Given real-world limits, the threshold was lower for most people.

The reason I mentioned compression is because you’d find people who’d say digital recordings didn’t sound good but misattributed why: the problem wasn’t digital, it was either low-quality codec implementations, constricted bit-rates[1], or technical flaws like the MP3 format’s inability to precisely handle sharp attack sounds like cymbals. If you did an A/B test with those, yes, people would notice a difference but the same was true of uncompressed audio or compression using newer codecs.

1. e.g. pre-VoLTE cell phone audio sounded terrible on most carriers unless you edited your phone’s settings to increase the bitrate, because the carriers were trying to fit more customers onto each cell tower. A little more bandwidth and it sounded much closer to landline calls.