It is a misconception that digital is lossy but analog is not. In digital recording, the finite bit depth of the sampling process effectively adds a small amoun

It is a misconception that digital is lossy but analog is not. In digital recording, the finite bit depth of the sampling process effectively adds a small amount of white noise to the signal (the difference between the sampled value and the true value). In analog recordings there are also plenty of noise sources, for example the grain size of a magnetic tape or the surface roughness of a vinyl. The difference is that the sampling noise level of a CD is way lower than what is physically possible for any analog medium. This is why we hear "tape hiss" and "vinyl crackle" during quiet parts of the music, but we don't hear "CD hiss". On top of that, nonlinearities anywhere within the analog signal chain introduces distortions that don't exist for a digital signal. Overall, a signal reproduced from a CD is much closer to the true signal than any analog medium could ever achieve.