Probably. But owning the CD allows you to re-rip it at some future date if you decide that storage is cheaper than it was 20 years ago and you'd really prefer to have some of your favorite albums in lossless FLAC format than lossy MP3. Or at the very least, maybe a higher quality mp3 than the 128kbps that was the norm during the Napster era.
You're entirely discounting the cost of physical storage. It's a non-zero and non-trivial cost to store and move all those CDs. If you've ripped them with high quality lossless settings you will not get better sound later reripping as FLAC. So unless you only ever ripped them with the old unregistered l3enc (limited to 112kbps and a shitty encoder anyways) there's little reason to rerip them.
You may want to keep physical CDs for nostalgia or because you like the physical artifact but if you've ripped them in the past 15 or so years your lossless copy is likely transparent to lossless to the human ear.
I fear you've misunderstood me. I said going from LOSSY to Lossless, not lossless to lossless. Meaning even if your first rip was LAME-encoded VBR MP3 or OGG, you might decide you want to re-rip later as FLAC or APE.
And you misunderstood me, if you've got a good LAME rip you will not be able to distinguish it from a FLAC rip off the original CD. You'll be using several times the storage for no perceptible improvement. While disk storage is cheap the physical storage of those CDs is not nor is the time required to handle the CDs to rip.
I get what you’re saying, but no one is really arguing that physical storage doesn’t exist as an issue. That being said, CD’s have a pretty small footprint. You can fit several hundred - if not upwards of a thousand - jewel cases + CD’s in a typical book case. As far as hobbies go they’re pretty space-efficient!
Plus the whole point of a physical collection is to have it and to be able to hold it/admire it. Everything takes up space. It’s not purely about the utility of having the music available.
Go tell any music archive to destroy their physical CD’s if they’ve ripped them (or if they have the masters), if you want to see my point. It’s not just about the music onboard.
What I find is that unless you keep CDs in a very well monitored environment (right humidity and away from light, etc..) they aren't aging very reliably and sometimes they stop working completely.
Burned CD’s, sure. Industry-pressed CD’s? Nah. If you’re keeping them in an even remotely temperature/humidity controlled environment (and obviously they aren’t scratched to hell but even then they often play haha) there’s no reason they shouldn’t play fine today no matter the age.
