
If digital were really
that much better there would be no discussion about cartridges, tonearms, turntables, cartridge setup and
most of all discussions like this one!
It would be moot. Its been about 41 years since the inception of the CD and LPs are still around?? I've no doubt that one day it will be better in every way...
when that day comes people won't argue about it.
The fact this thread exists points to this simple truth.
Anytime a new technology appears, if it is truly superior the prior art vanishes and becomes a thing of collectors for nostalgia only; dust bins of history and all that. Look at side valves in internal combustion engines. Overhead valves showed up and
no-one looks back- they are more reliable and offer vastly improved performance. No surprises here: no-one puts side valves in cars anymore. IOW the prior art has vanished.
That's not happened with the LP-
yet. So we know (whether we like it or not) the existing art needs improvement. You can make the argument that people prefer distortion.. and other such nonsense. Sheesh! The pragmatic individual will look at the bigger picture and see its really obvious the digital still has some homework to do.
I came to a similar-ish conclusion but based on a completely different set of experiences and experiments on myself.
I was a keen amateur recordist from the mid 1960s (though not much for the last 15 years). I started with a mono valve tape recorder and steadily upgraded until a Revox B77, which I still have and still works.
There are lots of little skills one develops to get good recordings but the one which digital fixed
with its first commercially available kit I used was dynamic range and accuracy.
I had been used to setting levels carefully balancing audible distortion on loud bits against audible hiss on quiet bits. It was pretty difficult and a hard won skill and one still got an unpleasant surprise from time to time with a louder “loud-bit” in performance than setup.
Anyway the first digital recorder I tried, a StellaDAT, it was easy to get a level where there was zero audible distortion on the peaks and zero audible noise and for the first time ever I was unable to tell the difference between the microphone feed and “off-tape”. I bought one. I still have it but it has lost its programme so doesn’t boot

.
Microphone choice and positioning is still as critical as ever but even the 16/48 digital of the DAT format was audibly completely transparent enough for music, which should be no surprise given the long known facts of human auditory capability and the dynamic range of actual music.
Basically IME if there is an audible shortcoming in a digital recoding it must be poor microphone choice or positioning or incompetent level setting, almost impossible with 24-bit recorders.
I have also done some tests on myself to get an idea of what I myself would be likely to hear both distortion and dynamic range wise which shows me that whilst I know from my recording experience analogue systems are not audibly transparent they are largely sufficiently good.
Whilst people are able to detect some shortcomings IME most of an analogue recording neither the distortion levels nor limited dynamic range of analogue systems are enough to ruin my musical enjoyment, or even notice often at all. If there at all just a few fractions of a second of audible distortion or hiss.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is a bigger difference in the sound quality of the gazillions of recordings there are for sale than there is in the potential of the different replay systems we may choose to play them on. I have stupendous CDs and disappointing ones. I have superb LPs and poor ones. It just is not a big thing for me.
What is a big thing, as an engineer doing noise and vibration at Garrard in the 1970s, is the prices charged for everything to do with playing records.
It fits into the “never give a sucker an even break” category IMO. Obscene.
The ”best” bit about LPs is how easy it is to “tune to taste”. I have 4 turntables which all sound different. There are huge variations in frequency response of cartridges compared to DACs and so forth. One could argue that having a rolled off cartridge because you have peaky speakers isn’t a smart solution, but at least it is possible.
With digital you get
exactly what the record company released and that’s it.