How can we settle for digital?

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.

Digital is fine - For background music as I work & do not have to leave my desk to flip, clean & cue every 20 minutes.
I normally listen to digital about 5 hours a day.
When it comes time for serious listening - I sit in the sweet spot & cue up 2 - 3 hours of vinyl.
To my ears - I have not heard any $3K CD player that approaches vinly!
Don't get me wrong as there is truely a place for digital, but comparing digital to vinly is like comparing digital to the compressed noise that comes from a ipod.
I've been a vinly collector & fanatic for 45 years & have almost every album that I could wish for.
Through my ears & my system digital (especially HRCD) can sound 85%-90% as good a vinly, but the last 10%- 15% is worth every penny & effort of listening to a great LP.

Before I had a vinyl set-up I had the EMM Labs DCC2se and CDSDse. It sounded quite good, but when I decided to sell it and go with vinyl I used the money to buy both vinyl playback and CD. I gave up on SACD because the titles were so limited and every time I heard vinyl somewhere, the differences, particularly in timbre, were too much to live without. I did find that a good SACD sounded better than most CDs, but certainly not all of them. Digital sounds good to me, unless I listen to vinyl first. My new CD player was more than $3000, and it only lacks a bit of extra detail in the highs that I found a bit fatiquing from the Meitner gear. There is no question that vinyl takes a lot of work to get it right, but, for me, I now cannot sit still for digital. Are there bad records? Absolutely. Is 180 gram vinyl the answer? Not to my ears -- some are great and some suck (I love Joni Mitchell, but Blue on 180 gram vinyl is definitely a polished turd). Sorry, got way off topic...

I will always now settle for cd because a cd can last past 1000000+ plays (apparently), whereas the forever warping, dusty, snappy, crackly, poppy vinyl can last maybe 450?
I do miss album covers though. I will admit that when I did play albums on my Linn LP12 it did sound more 'natural' than a cd. That was a few years back though.
My local thrift store was selling quite a few classical box sets on vinyl for 3 bucks each. I was surely tempted.