How can we settle for digital?

I agree with Viridian. Too often on this site, people discuss sound instead of music. As he says, and I would add unfortunately, there are too many great recordings that are only on CD, so I did go ahead and buy a CD player, though I didn't spend $3000, I bought the Rega Apollo for almost a third of that total.

That said, I do agree that digital, though improving as some have noted, will never equal analog in quality. So I continue to buy records at least 90% of the time. Being a professional classical musician, most of my listening is to classical and jazz, and as I have said on a couple of other threads, they simply recorded things better back then in the exclusively analog era. Those recordings are often just as musically satisfying as today's digital releases, and often more so. The technical proficiency of most musicians coming out of conservatories today is much higher even than it was 20-30 years ago, but their musicianship is not correspondingly improved, and conductors are not getting any better either, especially here in the states. But I'm getting way off topic, so I'll shut up now.

I hope digital will make a rebound, only this time by upping the sampling rate to equal what is captured by the master. Perhaps this could be offered via downloads or Blue Ray?

CD's are a very long way from the original studio digital. If we could even get close to what's captured on the original drive, we would be dazzled by the quality and excited at the prospect of purchasing a copy.

Maybe someday? Until then, I'll continue with tried and true LP format.

Or will you stand up for your $3000+ CDP? Is it just polishing a turd?

$3000 just to "polish a turd"?

Anyone considering a $3000 Hi-Fi purchase as "polishing a turd", might also need this.

We must remember that digital is only the storage format. Vinyl has plenty of problems with its storage of information and retrieval. There are plenty of bad sounding records out there....its just that there seems to be more bad sounding cd's. That being said, if digital had the sampling rate high enough, and the bit size adequate to store all there is on a master tape, then there would be no need for vinyl other than nostalgia and having performances that never made it to cd. So where does that leave us today, a few bits short, and a little undersampled. When I want background music, I use cd. When I want to hear into the music and enjoy the performance, vinyl has to spin. My VPI SM makes analog sing like live music with the emotion so often missing from the cd. There are however good cd recordings out there. Just listen to the Mighty Sam McClain on the AQ label recorded in XRCD, engineer Alan Yashida, and this rivals vinyl. And there are many others. I don't think of the recording limitations of cd when I hear this cd. CD just has a very narrow margin of correct and not correct. Whether it is AD or DA problems or just that some engineers are using the wrong mics or have not learned how to optimize cd yet, the mystery remains. I think ultimately, cd is just more convenient to work with and the engineers are more tempted to "fiddle" and "tinker" with the sound rather than just try and reproduce the live event. Bottom line, get a vinyl rig if you don't have one and remember how music is supposed to sound. CD is close, but no cigar...not yet. jallen

I wonder if most of the people who are knocking digital either have not heard a great digital player (especially the ones from the past few years) or just have so much invested in vinyl that they are biased.

The fact is that the very best digital players out there now pretty much equal vinyl and can better it on certain things. An incredible amount of progress has been made within the last five years. On these postings, like everywhere in life, prople make statements that they do not know in fact to be true. Maybe they heard a $3000 digital player and draw their conclusions from that. Well, $3000 bucks won't go very far in buying a TT, cartridge or arm either.

This is by no means the only great player, but how many people knocking digital have heard the EMM Labs CDSA SE? You cannot say that a similarly priced TT performs better any better than this unit. When you factor in the convinence of CDs, frankly i think the EMM Labs wins hands down but either way certainly does not lose on performance.

Analog can sound great. But I cannot tell you how many times I have heard great analog setups and the owner plays some record that has so many scratches and pops in it. For me, this noise destroys the realism. Anyone can have a preference, but you just have to wonder how much of what is said on here is based on informed opinion.