When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Is not the path to the soul through heart, rather than through the hardware? Seems that'good'equipment (Plato wrote, above: "..use the right gear and set it up properly") - be it tubes or ss, analog or digital - is a vehicle to get you where you want to go. The final common pathway is the individual ear, hear and gear, rather than the a blanket dismissal of one form or sound reproduction. To set up mutually exclusive false dichotomies, engenders ideological conflicts - already rampant - regarding which camp is the keeper of audio truth.

Simply put: there are many roads that lead to mecca, or in this case to conveying "the soul of music"; and each listner will find it as s/he will.

I'm trying to understand how one gets off on digital. Is it the individual sounds sounding so life-like? I have heard some incredible sounding digital. For instance, at the Stereophile hi-end show in San Francisco in 1988(?). They were using Apogee speakers with Krell electronics, and were playing the Bodyguard(not sure of the title) cd by Whitney Houston. The sound absolutely astounded me. I could hear where, in her throat, the sound was coming from. The problem, for me, was that it didn't drive me nuts(like analog lp's) to listen to it again. Why is that?

I'm trying to understand how one gets off on digital.

This sounds to me like a question of fetishism rather than one of audio. You might have better results by asking a therapy professional.

I also wonder if the recording mechanism of digital is inherently flawed. How easy would it be to double the sampling rate(this question dates me, as far as when I was last interested in digital)? And Tvad, I'm working backwards. In other words, analog does it for me, and digital doesn't. My question is why?

In other words, analog does it for me, and digital doesn't. My question is why?

I understand your question, and I'm suggesting to you that you won't find the answer in any responses in this thread, because it has to do with your personal perception of the listening experience. Audiophiles are not professionally trained to help individuals understand themselves.