Help me - am I stupid

By analog you mean vinyl? If so, CD has far better dynamic range and accuracy, it only loses to vinyl in terms of ultra-sonics (but I guess you can then say vinyl loses to 16/96 to 24/96 in that same regard), which while you can’t hear may cause the tweeters to distort.

There are no nuances that CD misses, 44.1kHz by proven by Nyquist-Shannon captures the 0Hz to 22050Hz range with 100% accuracy, not even 0.0000000...0001% loss.

I know some people who prefer the static of FM radio over the clean sound of CD, so while vinyl isn’t that poor, maybe it’s a similar thing for you.

Don’t worry about not being able to play DSD files in their native format. Most good playback software will convert DSD to PCM so you can play it through your DAC. In JRiver the default setting is PCM so all you have to do is select any DSD file in your collection and JRiver will play it back as a hi-res PCM. It’s easy. When buying hi-res music files, I have found that 24/96 files sound as good as 24/192. So, if they’re cheaper buy the 24/96 version in FLAC or WAV format.  I download hi-res albums from HDTracks.  Cheers!

So the Sony licensed DSD is not popular? They did the same thing with Betamax and look what happened.

Video format wars all over again... Crazy!