I totally agree, most of my music collection was ripped from CDs to hard drive. Played back on my current set-up, which is without a doubt the best and most revealing I've had to date, some albums sound fantastic and have scaled with the improvements in my playback equipment. Whereas some albums were so poorly recorded in the first place that they sound little better than they did on cassette played on the crummy Walkman and headphones I had as a teenager - nostalgia and rose tinted glasses notwithstanding.
One of the albums I bought on Bandcamp recently came with two copies of each track, one 16bit 44.1khz, one 24bit 88.2khz, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could hear the difference. To my surprise, I could, but if Iook at the file information it looks as though something else is going on, the 24bit versions of the tracks have a higher dynamic range and when played they are slightly quieter than the 16bit version:
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