Whilst better than LPs, since it is less compromised for manufacture, still not as good as CD.
Yes, if you set levels wrong it is quite forgiving of overload, nice even. But producing a recording indistinguishable from the microphone feed? None that I have used. Plus the audible hiss on the quiet bits of classical recordings is distracting.
I remember when CD first came out. I was listening to a track (original analog tape) that, at one point in the recording, the right channel dropped out for a few seconds. With headphones I heard distinct tape hiss on the 'silent' channel. You couldn't hear that on the LP. It was then and there that I realized how digital was objectively better than analog tape.
On the other hand, I remember a discussion I had with the late Peter Aczel, editor of
The Audio Critic. We were discussing the DGG studio recording of Levine's Ring, and subjective impressions of digital sound. I copy a section of our correspondence:
(Me) I’d like to share an experience. Once, while listening to the Levine/Met Ring, I immediately became aware of something unusual, something I’d not really thought about before. The sound coming from my speakers had absolutely no background artifacts. With records, there is always something extraneous going on in the quiet passages. At a live performance there is always something in the background, even if it is just audience noise. On the various Bayreuth live recordings one hears stage artifacts, most notably within quiet passages. However, the sound of my “studio” Ring, while pristine, seemed almost artificial ...
(PA) Your Levine/Met recordings of the Ring sound a bit sterile because they were made in Manhattan Center (New York), which is an acoustically rather dead venue. In 1989, Max Wilcox produced a wonderful-sounding recording of the Mahler 5th (Mehta/NY on Teldec, released 1990) in that same Manhattan Center. He added some very subtle artificial reverb, which is not at all perceptible as such but makes the sound come alive. Now, compression is a highly complicated issue. The dynamic range of the human ear is more than 120 dB. The dynamic range of 16-bit digital recording is theoretically 98 dB. The difference between the absolute softest audible music in a concert hall and the loudest climaxes is of the order of 60 to 70 dB because of the ambient noise floor. Let us say you need 1 milliwatt of amplifier power, in a given installation, to play the softest passages (I am just guessing), then 70 dB above that would come to 10,000 watts. Any domestic loudspeaker would go up in smoke with that kind of input. With extremely high-efficiency horn-type theater speakers the numbers change; it is actually possible to produce levels of 110 or 115 dB or even more in a single installation, and here’s the remarkable thing—you can tolerate it because the distortion is low. We tend to judge loudness by the amount of distortion we hear, not by SPL! You wouldn’t adjust the volume control if you heard no distortion. So, you could have your “too good” 98-dB balls-to-the-wall digital recording without compression, if the efficiency and power-handling capability of your system were adequate—which they generally are not.
What Peter said about lack of distortion in digital is correct. With my current system, I can play very loud since my amplification chain and speakers are low distortion. I can listen louder, even to LPs, but then other LP related noise interferes.