Not really true these days. Even a lot of relatively cheap soundcards have an honest-to-God clean dynamic range that exceeds the intrinsic theoretical cleanliness possible for a Red Book CD. It used to be that converters good enough to do this transparently cost a bundle, but these days they are dirt cheap.
We've done these kinds of conversions before for both audio and video. As long as the converters are cleaner than the source material can be, the quality is limited by the intrinsic cleanliness of the source material. And these days, that means you can effectively get perfect copies by transcoding through an analog conversion that nobody can tell wasn't direct from source. Especially true when there is only a single DAC-to-ADC conversion like you are talking about here.
There is some irony in that by the time DAC/ADCs became good enough to not need to worry about accumulated conversion degradation (e.g. when daisy chaining many conversion stages, not just one or two), everything started to being kept purely in the digital domain anyway.