A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

My take on the sampling rate is based on two things. The Nyquist theorem and the real stretch of engineering to get it to work.. at the time. In fact the powers to be DID go higher than the minimum by going to 44 instead of 40KHz. And just the fact Sony partnered with Phillips says a lot about how difficult the problems were. (Sony went alone in every other endeavor, except CD) Early state of the art could only manage 14 bits!  And they were really trying hard!                      
So the notion that they limited it due to customer approval?          ridiculous. Reads like fantasy hindsight to me. Certainly today the whole thing seems easy...

stevecham

The sampling rate of lacquer/metal/vinyl is the number of polymer molecules flying past the stylus at the outer edge, ~15 ips, to ~ 8 ips at the inner part of the groove. That number is astronomical and blows away any conceivable, let alone practical, digital sampling rates.

For that to be true, each molecule would have to be capable of registering either a 1 or a zero. Were that the case, we’d be loading computer software such as Windows and MS Office from LP - there’d be no need for a CD-ROM. We wouldn't need the DVD, either - we could put entire movies on a single LP side. But of course that isn’t even remotely true. CD can store substantially more data than any LP.

teo_audio

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met.

Other than you, who has made this claim? You're suggesting that an LP can hold more data than a CD. That simply isn't even remotely true.

The 15ips thing caught my eye... On a tape machine.. with it running at 15ips.. Well each magnetized particle of material on the tape could be thought of as a  ON/OFF digital particle. So one could calculate the number of magnetized individual particles moving past the head gap per second and get a real bit rate...This might be a way to get some analog to digital comparison?

elizabeth

The 15ips thing caught my eye... On a tape machine.. with it running at 15ips.. Well each magnetized particle of material on the tape could be thought of as a ON/OFF digital particle. So one could calculate the number of magnetized individual particles moving past the head gap per second and get a real bit rate...This might be a way to get some analog to digital comparison?

That won’t work because a tape head can’t read a single magnetized tape particle in isolation. The head has a gap that reads a whole bunch of " magnetized individual particles " all at once.

The notion that any traditional analog media - such as tape or LP - can hold an amount of data equal to that in a CD just isn’t valid. And that’s exactly what led to the invention of the CD in the first place.