One of the promises of digital audio was its imperviousness to the vagaries of vinyl and tape. Unlike it's analog precursor, digital audio could be endlessly copied, transported over any medium, and stored in any number of ways. It was perfection.
Bits is bits.
Only, it didn't work out that way. True enough that with those bits we can stream, copy, and share without any concerns of degraded sound—something unthinkable with data scraped off a plastic disc by a moving stylus.
Turns out that, like everything in life, the story of bits is more complicated than we had been promised. How many bits? How were they captured? At what speed? Is their timing accurate? How were they converted back to their analog origins?
"Bits is bits" is a fine off-the-cuff dismissal of the complexities of capturing and playing back music without loss.
It's just not true.
