Probably. At the same time the audio environment you describe as your own and your ideal strikes me as hermetically sealed as Proust's cork-lined room. Ultimately solipsistic in that we cannot know what you experience.
How so? Why would my subjective experience be any different from your own in terms of "knowing" what someone else is experiencing?
If I say "I like my turntable, I think it's a cool device knowing something about the challenges turntable design presents and how the engineers sought to approach the problems."
You say "I really like how this DAC measures. I like knowing that the signal is being reproduced with as little deviation as possible."
How exactly is what is going on in your brain any more, or less, "hermetically sealed" than mine?
And how can I "know" what you experience when thinking about your DAC, or when listening to it, any more than you can "know" what I experience when thinking about or listening on my turntable?
Now, I don't think we are stuck in pure ignorance and pure reletavism/subjectivism. We can measure the differences between LPs and digital, and also determine things like what distortion types and levels are audible, and we can catalogue their subjective effects. But insofar as these things are available for investigation, there's no real difference in principle between LPs and digital, right? As if one was in the realm of the "purely subjective" and the other wasn't. If someone claims to hear a difference between DACs, that can be tested vie blind testing to raise or lower confidence levels. If someone claims to prefer an LP to a digital version, that in principle is open to the same type of blind test confirmation/disconfirmation.
In my experience, I cannot unhear the flaws inherent in LP reproduction.
Which makes your preference for digital over vinyl entirely sensible. It's possible that if we both heard a digital and an LP version of a track I *might* prefer the LP and you would prefer the digital. But in any case I'd say "Even though I prefer the vinyl version, I get why you prefer the digital version."
People simply looking for the music they like on a format with the pitch and distortion issues baked into the format that LPs possess are bound to be disappointed.
Well, your prediction has failed the test of reality. Which I think is a result of the not-quite-being-able-to-see-beyond-one's-own-criteria problem I spoke of. Vinyl has become as popular again as it has for reasons your analysis is missing. Far from being disappointed, most people buying vinyl, including most getting in to vinyl for the first time, have reported satisfaction with the sound of vinyl, but also greater satisfaction with LP buying overall, because they find that physical format fulfills certain desires that digital music has not. That is for the people who are the current market for vinyl, of course. If your criteria is to find the format with the least pitch and distortion issues, then yes you will be disappointed by vinyl and it's not going to be the main format for you. But...you have to understand that such a criteria is generally NOT driving people to vinyl; people really in to vinyl have varying criteria that vinyl fulfills very well.
(This seems so obvious it's weird to have to keep pointing it out...)
