I see nothing wrong at all with this approach provided it is for your own use...which it obviously is.

Selling cd's is legal but it operates under a conscious fiction that you're NOT keeping your own digital copy. If you are, then it's technically illegal and unethical, but it's not enforced and it's so common as to be enforceable anyway.

Cd quality is good, but it might be possible that even with diminished hearing you could still tell a relative difference between cd and hi Rez. Maybe, depending on your situation.

The value of a recording lays in the musical content, not the physical support (which, BTW, may even be absent).
Therefore, you are planning to buy both support and content, then sell both while still keeping the content. Sure you can do it, and I doubt someone will ever knock at your door to check that what you sold is no longer in your computer, but still...

would you lose sound quality if you made a digital copy of a digital file. so what if you ripped a cd to a wav file then burned the wav file to a CD-R. then ripped that CD for some reason to a wav file then burned that back to a CD-R and repeated the process. how many times before you would be able to notice a loss in sound quality?

JSpeer,I actually spent a lot of time building my collection from used CD's. Actually purchase large collections on Ebay for some time to build up a decent digital library. Great way to discover new music

two things to keep in mind, if you are importing the CD to a computer, assuming you are using a good program, it will be an exact copy of the disk. You can only lose audio quality on playback and this is due to the real time nature of audio and the lack of time for error correction to be performed. As long as you keep the music in the data domain, it is the same as any other file on your computer. So sound quality should be identical to the CD once on your drive.

Also, ethically speaking you should keep the CD's and it is also a good idea to have the original backup should something go wrong. basically digital audio offers a number of conveniences but the thing to keep in mind, is every hard drive will fail one day. not try to discourage you but they have limited useful life so its best to plan ahead. So if you are starting a digital music collection you need to think data redundancy.

I personally have my collection stored on a NAS drive (with a redundant raid, basically there is a copy of everything on a second drive data will stay in tack given a single drive failure. From there i have the whole collection backed up to the cloud to protect against a full NAS fail. I also keep the backup CD should I ever need them.

I realize this is a bit off topic but wanted to highlight the above as there would be nothing worse than copying all your music to a computer only to have the hard drive fail.

to assure perfect copy you must first use a lossless format.
i prefer FLAC.
the other factor to consider is metadata.
that is all the stuff like track info, cover-art, etc.
EAC is a shareware software that is good.
my personal preference is dBdatabse.
it (and others) will compare your copied file to all the other copies of the original & report any errors.
before you start building your library, take the time to learn what the options are, & what you want & need.
nothing worse than having to start all over once you find all your ripped music files don't have or do what you need them to.

Bill

I wanted to point out that frequency spectrum is only part of the equation. Transients often take place with accelerations that, should you try to describe them with or fit them to a sine wave, would require a 60-100kHz sine wave to match what we can detect. And transients are one big part of many elements that make music seem real. But that is one big argument for higher resolution than red book. My uncle is a few years older than you, and he had been out of audio for thirty years. He was convinced that high end audio was pointless for him, and then I brought him to a hifi shop and he was able to ABC three different nice speaker sets with the same source-to-amp setups. And now he is on a hifi kick he never could have afforded as a kid.

Also, the point about keeping digital domain info digital as long as possible is a good one. Converting to analog and back to digital just allows timing, pitch, and whatever other errors to stack up. The clocks controlling the digital-analog and analog-digital conversions are not perfect, and their errors add up to become more and more audible. Often it detracts from what could have been more than presents itself as blatant nastiness.

With regards to the legality and ethics of the buy/rip/sell/repeat strategy, I think the ethics are the bigger deal. I was a freshman in college when Napster had its brief heyday, and my college Internet connection allowed me to add songs to my collection as fast as I could decide which I wanted. I still harbor resentments to Lars Ulrich and Dr. Dre for killing it. That said, beyond the sub-par sound quality, I don't participate in pirating because I have seen the vans my favorite artists tour in. I want to do right by these artists I respect. I often advocate that "legal" and "right" are rarely the same thing, but in this case I tend to agree with the laws. I still don't come to complete stops at remote stop signs with good visibility, however...

If the music is paid for once, then how a user plays around with it for his or her own use is fair game as far as I can see. It would be a different story if there was a profit motive in selling copies or something, but the first test of ownership of anything is "can you sell it?" If you can't sell something you own, then you do not own it.

This issue came up many years ago when people wanted to sell their ipods loaded with songs they had purchased, ripped or whatever.

Catch,

The legal issue is selling the CD while maintaining a digital copy. If you were to delete the copy then you would be in the clear. If i had to guess the heart of the legal issue would fall under copyright law but don't know for sure.