i completely get preferring analog media, so if it’s about the sound characteristics (that ‘warmth’), having physical media, etc fair enough. but if the goal of an audiophile is to get the highest quality reproduction of a recording wouldn’t CDs or FLACs be your best bet?
maybe this only really applies for newer music, perhaps digital releases for music recorded analogue are just digitized vinyl or reel to reel recordings but for music produced in DAWs the highest quality version available for that release would surely be either a CD or a digital FLAC release
Well, there exists formats like SACD that technically have no DAC, in a manner of speaking. The “garbage” 0s and 1s there run at such a high sample rate that they average out to the correct signal with a tiny bit of low-pass filtering. This guy is the god of explaining precisely and correctly how digital audio works, Monty from Xiph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM