Should WEB-DLs be preferred over lossless CD?

[jieraya]

Hello, audiophile comrades,  what do you prefer more than anything when it comes to lossless audio - CD flacs  or WEB-DL?  Hi-res music files (24/96 or more bigger) sure takes lots of space and pretty rare to dig from any ordinary trackers. Actually the artists I take interest is really hard to find as being less known jewels from the underground. So I always somewhat felt saturated just collecting lossless CDs.  I am always doubtful and anal when it comes to music. As CDs have  .logs and .cues, I always intended to collect them. But there is always a doubt if it's truly lossless as the CD, the physical disk, gets worn up by time and data may partially be lost just by getting scratches and whatever else. So the reason behind moving onto WEB-DLs should be that the quality is never lost here as the source is studio recording. But it sorta has the possibility of being transcoded from lossy source. Spectro analysis should be able to detect so. These days I am collecting hi-res music tagged web-dl  that are 24/96. My hard drive is going to die someday sooner or later.

What's your thought on this issue of  CD / Web-dl lossless music? And most importantly, why? Know thanks in advance.

[connor17]

Audiophiles are conceited, showboats that love big numbers, because their ignorance about anything remotely scientific left them at the mercy of marketing nonsense disguised as refined taste.

They repeat like parrots the idiocies they read in elitist sites, places where their blatant ignorance is only matched by their arrogance.

So, my vote goes to the nonexistent "whatever floats your boat".

[Sid]

That ^

Expanding on it:

There is no such thing as lossless.

That is to say "lossless" is a technical term with a very specific and limited meaning, which has been hijacked by marketers and swallowed by consumers who have no idea what it really means.

A codec is lossless if it can be used to convert a file (call it file A) from one format to another (call the result file B), to convert the result back to the original format (call the result file C), and to have file C be identical to file A. That is all. It has nothing to do with quality, either objectively or subjectively. File A can be total crap, and as long as file C is equally crap it is lossless.

As for what the term is mistakenly assumed to mean, that is equally bogus. The recording, production and reproduction processes all alter the quality of sound.

Strip it down to the bare essentials and realize this: concert venues around the world work continually to improve their "acoustics". i.e. any given orchestra, on any given stage, performing any given piece of music, will "sound better" to any given listener based on where they are sitting in the concert hall or whether there is a precisely angled board situated somewhere above their heads. Nothing about the music itself is gained or lost, yet the subjective experience still differs based on literally nothing but the air between the listener and the sound source.

[Hiroven]

Nothing about the music itself is gained or lost, yet the subjective experience still differs based on literally nothing but the air between the listener and the sound source.

Although I generally agree with your post, I would say the last part is not correct. The subjective experience apart, due to reflections from walls in concert venues there are slightly different levels of sound (also dependent on its frequency) at different places -> objective difference in quality. Now improving "acoustics" would probably be to achieve minimal reflections and thus equal distribution of sound in all places (or ratios between different frequencies... there still might be reduction of overall volume due to distance). This is why recording rooms are fitted with anti-reflection surfaces.