Yes, that was an error; sorry for any confusion. What I was trying to express is that the bitrates of digital recording equipment in the early 80s had become so

Yes, that was an error; sorry for any confusion. What I was trying to express is that the bitrates of digital recording equipment in the early 80s had become so high that the digital recording would be effectively indistinguishable from its analogue source. Yet, not long beforehand, the capacity and speed of digital memory was insufficient to keep up with the required ~44khz sampling rate required. It seems that my confabulation of 192kbps was also a gross underestimation - apparently, the Sony PCM-1, which was released in 1977, already had a bitrate of 573kbps.