I believe you're correct that raising the volume is not necessarily a destructive process, since it would just be increasing the amplitude of the samples alread

I believe you're correct that raising the volume is not necessarily a destructive process, since it would just be increasing the amplitude of the samples already there. Unfortunately, the majority of rips fall over EAC's normalize threshold, which means the volume is decreased, which ends up truncating some of the bits (assuming the album was using the full range of the 16bit audio). Edit: I noticed you used the term "fidelity", so you might be talking about being able to perceive the damage to the audio, which is not necessarily what I'm talking about. The point of EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is to make archival quality copies of audio CDs, this means as close to bit-exact as possible. Modifying the audio in any way would be counterproductive to that purpose, even if it doesn't necessarily affect the actual sound quality.