Lossless to all practical purposes, then. With 16 bits of amplitude quantisation the smallest bit is below the noise floor of all but the quietest possible ampl

Lossless to all practical purposes, then. With 16 bits of amplitude quantisation the smallest bit is below the noise floor of all but the quietest possible amplification, and while 44.1kHz isn't a lot it still places the corner frequency of your antialiasing filter comfortably above human hearing. It's got way more audio bandwidth than most of the analogue masters that everyone raves about. No, there's nothing magically audible happening with phase shifts near the steep cutoff of the antialiasing filter that isn't happening with the gentle rolloff of tape, either. Not that you could hear anyway, and even though my hearing is better than most 48-year-old industrial music enthusiasts, not that I could hear either. For cats, even your very best equipment with perfect reproduction sounds like AM radio because their hearing tops out at 80kHz.