“Listen to this, Meemaw. At 1:23, there’s a faint pop. At 2:47, the violins clip. This isn’t true lossless. It’s a transcode — someone took a 128kbps MP3 and converted it to FLAC. That’s like putting a bumper sticker on a rusted truck and calling it new.”

Meemaw squinted. “Sheldon, honey, I can’t hear a thing wrong with it.”

The next day, Sheldon tracked down the original vinyl rip from a university archive — true lossless, with spectrals to prove it. He wrote a one-page guide for the school computer lab titled: “How to Spot Fake Lossless Audio in Three Steps.”

She handed him a glass of sweet tea. “So what’s the useful part of all this? You gonna sit here and sulk, or learn something?”