I assume you're referring to bit depth and sampling. In that case, any digitization is lossy, because where do you draw the line?
You draw the line at the limits of human hearing, which turn out to be about 20 bits from softest audible sounds to "hearing damage inside a minute"and a sample rate of around 48 ksa/s.
CDs weren't quite there. Modern stuff recorded with 24 bit depth and high bit rates is effectively lossless.
One of the goods things about the limitations of the CD format is that we learned a lot about masking noise via dithering (deliberately introducing more noise) and noise shaping.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200310174634/https://people.xi...
Dithering gives about 120 dB of useful dynamic range, so I can't imagine a case where someone wanted more. You can't go much lower than the noise floor of the environment and you don't want to go too far above 100 dB, because this already isn't pleasant (nor good for your ears; 85 dB is considered the upper safe SPL limit for longer exposure). I'd risk stating that even without dithering, the default 96 bit depth is good enough in typical listening conditions.
Yep, that’s part of my point, but CD audio in particular isn’t that great of bit depth or sampling rate, even by standards of the time for uncompressed digital audio. There’s also the point that the “audio wars” era covered the era of CD audio and that’s certainly another major audio quality factor.
No producer or technician has any basis to complain about CD audio quality for listening by humans; the deficiencies of their CDs are entirely their fault.
Ok, so since I can still identify sound frequencies >22khz despite being now 40yrs old, I’m not entitled as a human to critique the CD audio format, especially as I can tell you the exact moment when the audio range is being clipped in the songs I enjoy?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200310174634/https://people.xi...
Do we need to cover the site rules again? Is it assuming best intent to try and straw man my argument to serve what purpose, boost your ego?
1) of course the audio engineers knew what they were doing who created the CD audio standard.
2) of course they also had constraints from picking “best”, cost among them, and designed something that satisfied the demands placed on them as best as they could.
How does any of these tangents y’all have went on disprove the only point I made, that CD audio is not lossless (close, but no cigar) in the audio sound quality sense.