Searching For Substance In Sound

Last night I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine. Let us call him Trucker James. In this chat we were having we branched off on a topic about CD's. He of course had recently had downloaded a new album off of Itunes and I of course said I preferred to have the actual physical copy. This happened to bring him to ask me if I was stuck in 1992. I do own an Ipod and I have a physical collection of around 2500 Cd's. I was a employee for National Record Mart back in the day and being a musician I eat, breathe, and sleep sound twenty four hours a day. I preface this because we were referring to the amount of space that it takes up to own such a collection. Do not get me wrong I love my Ipod and the accessibility and convince that it provides me to carry all of my music with me everywhere I go, but as an audiophile I do have issues with the Ipod vs the quality of Cd's. Now for the most part, there are two types of people when it comes to music. Those who listen and those who actually "listen". My place is in the latter of the two. There was my chorus teacher who gave me the greatest gift I could have ever had. She taught me the ability to be "ear trained". Musicians know of what I speak but for those who do not. Ear Training is when you develop your hearing to be able to distinguish tone , pitch, and harmony and the ability to remember everything you hear. This has become a valuable tool. If you give me a piece of music and let me hear it , I can for the most part play it back to you simply by hearing it. This also helps with those who sing. To make this easier, for me music is a spiritual experience for me. I am very serious about it and if I am either playing or simply listening to a piece of music I will loose all space, time and will loose myself in the places between the notes. So for me I am not only simply enjoying a song or album but I am analyzing every instrument and their relationship they share , what tone colors they bring to a song, and what the intention of what the artist is trying to say sonically. In a sense I become and take on that song. Ask any great performer and they will tell you the same. You can see it in their eyes. For the sake of my debate there is a huge difference in the sound quality of MP3's and Cd's. I know people will argue with me on this but if you really listen to it the rate of which a CD captures audio and the amount the mp3 format uses is a huge difference. Most of us know that the reason mp3's are great is because they do not take up huge amounts of space, but for that you do pay an audio price. The file is compressed so that you are going to loose certain audio elements that if you listen to the same song in either format, you can tell the difference. To most they don't care. To me as picky about sound as I am I want an actual representation of what is put on tape. I do hope in the future they will be able to fix this problem and get as close to what a CD can reproduce.
Riddle me this Batman. What happens if your hard drive, Ipod, or IPhone crashes and or dies? How are you going to get those downloads back? Yes it is convenient, yes it is only a click away to buy what you want to hear. This is the reason I want the physical copy. If I loose my computer, etc, Your basically screwed. Unless you burn those files and for all of you PLEASE DO. I would love to know what your thoughts are on the subject and what do you think could be an easier or improved way to keep track of your collections. Let me know what you think and if you do see the difference. It may be trivial to some but to the many of us who deeply and passionately care about music, I still love to pick up that jewel box and know it is something I will have with me forever, eternal in digital.