Okay, I'll play it another way:
* Many people mock audiophile enthusiasts who believe analogue replay is superior to digital - including people on this forum
* The people who mock the others claim that a key reason is that vinyl replay adds "nice distortion" to the sound - making it more appealing, palatable compared to "neutral" digital
* Which means digital replay for those vinyl advocates is doomed to always sound "less good" - because, as all here know, digital is already perfect
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* The fly in the ointment in this tale is that many of those poor audiophiles are now assembling digital chains, from components which measure beautifully - and, it sounds as good as analogue! ... Oh, horror!!
* What can this mean? Have those crafty manufacturers slipped in a bit of analogue wobbliness on the sly, to placate these deprived listeners? Or, could it mean that they've managed to reduce some hard to measure anomalies so that the listening is more pleasurable? ... Hmmm ... I'm on ASR ... naahhh!!
WBF generally makes me want to chuck up so I haven't looked at it in a while.
The actual recording is the thing that makes the most difference IME. I have fabulous sounding LPs and awful ones. I have superb sounding CDs (one of which is one of the first I bought giving the lie to huge improvements in digital bollox one reads) and some dire ones (the most recent REM CD I bought is really crap) so the difference between CD and LP is swamped by recording/mixing quality differences anyway.
My digital recorder is transparent as far as I can hear, that is to say I can not tell the microphone feed from the output of the recorder. That has been the case for some years on the sort of music I record. Maybe there are some sounds where this is not the case, but I haven't heard any.
Where I have the LP and CD of the same performance the mix is obviously different.
Where I have recorded a LP digitally the recording sounds like the LP, not the CD. As far as I am concerned digital can be, and usually is, transparent, and has been for years.
I know quite a bit about record players and their shortcomings from working at Garrard in the mid 1970s. Nothing I have noticed people are writing about today is new, it was all well known and addressed in different ways by record player designers back then. No record player addresses all the weaknesses of LP playback equally well since sorting some exacerbate others - it is simply a case of balancing colourations to one's personal taste.
The least linear bits of a record player are the pivoted arm and all conventional cartridges. The standard cartridge design is compromised in order to ride warps and eccentricities and being tolerant of defects gives a big loss of fidelity. It is rare for a cartridge to have less than 2% distortion, and then never anywhere near that good at higher frequencies.
Like many others I love my record players and the sound they generate. I have 4, they all sound different as I would expect and for reasons which have been known for decades.
Having a digital system where a CD or stream sounds like an LP is spectacularly unlikely. Not only are the masters different (mono bass, boost to low levels and limited level at high frequencies needed for the LP) but the tracking distortion of the arm and cartridge distortion are certainly high enough to be audible (and different between cartridges, often a very great deal). Luckily this distortion, and the effect of the compromises needed to cut and play an LP are euphonic
To produce the same or similar sound from a digital source as an LP would require a specially designed DAC with similar levels of distortion to a record player - and these are indeed being attempted, or I suppose a plugin for a digital player, though that would probably not be expensive enough or analogue enough for some people.
When I went from recording on R2R to digital the better fidelity of digital was immediately apparent on comparing microphone feed to recording but I must say the "graceful" way a tape recorder overloads does give a pleasant sound. I have heard that the plugin which emulates tape overload is one of the most popular amongst digital recordists