Well, no doubt in my mind that anything that I possess in the way of music that is in a format less that what the music was originally recorded in would be considered lossy using the guidlines provided in this thread. I would think that for the confines of this discussion without regard to what the industry and codec terminology brings to the table, that is a very simple and easy answer. How much benefit that gives would be greatly altered by other factors pointed out here in this discussion.
The one question that I would have would be how you would define the term lossless with concern to analog music that was recorded on tape or other formats? There seems to be no reference concerning analog music transferred from (say) tape as once the music is digitized, any format could be considered lossy once a newer higher resolution format was used to transfer the recording to the digital realm. Would 16/44 be considered lossy compared to 24/192 with both recordings being directly digitized from the same analog source? Could we once day be making the argument that 24/192 is not very good compared to other formats that technology may lead us to in the future?
So if the digital recording was originally made on a digital source, then the answer would be easy to figure out if we were aware of the specifics. If it was made on an analog source, then the answer can become convoluted pretty quickly.
