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

Perhaps the human cutoff frequency of 20 khz is the problem here. While humans cannot perceive tones (continuous sine waves) above 20 khz or so, there may very well be a psycho-acoustic or other human response to high frequencies. The leading edge of a square wave, for example, has many ultrasonic frequency components. Those high frequencies may be perceived as an initial sound “attack” and may contibute to a sense of realism when reproduced correctly (proper phase and amplitude).
As an electrical engineer, with reduced high frequecy perception due to aging, I cannot explain why adding a supertweeter to my system makes the sound more spacious and realistic.
Btw, in my fairly pricey system, vinyl is superior to most digital, but both are very enjoyable. I think digital needs to increase the sampling rate throughout the entire recording to playback chain.

By your logic, a robotic woman would be better than a real woman. I still prefer the real woman. Imperfect. But more life. More character.

By coincidence I received my January 2019 issue of The Absolute Sound yesterday. I’m looking through the table of contents and I see a review of the MSB Reference DAC and Transport. The blurb says, "After railing mightily against all things digital for almost thirty years, our Mr. Valin (Jonathan Valin) has finally found a DAC and transport he can live with long-term."

A couple of quotes from the review:

"As I just said it wasn’t as if Connick and Marsalis had developed the body and bloom of an LP on voice and sax. And yet, in spite of this, the MSB gear reproduced both singer and sax with such supernaturally lifelike immediacy, resolution of performance detail, neutrality of tone color and dynamic range that they sounded ’there’ enough to astonish me."

"To be frank, when it comes to digital sources, I ain’t no Robert Harley. Still, I know real when I hear it, and with the Reference DAC/Transport I heard it to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible the day before this MSB gear arrived - and I heard it on CD, SACD, high-res streaming, and (par excellence) MQA streaming."

(me again) So it appears that there were no stairstep soundwaves coming out of Mr. Valin’s speakers, no missing information and no digital ice flecks blowing in his face.

The base price of the DAC is $39,500 with a number of upgrade options ranging from $990 to $14,905 (for a femto 33 clock, the femto 77 clock costs $4,995 if you’re on a tight budget). The transport costs $18,500.

This is not the top-of-the-line model either. The top-of-the-line model is supposed to be better in every way. That’s still a lot of money for a DAC and Transport, though, but it’s chicken feed compared to his analog gear. A couple of examples (he has much more): Acoustic Signature Invictus Jr /T-9000 $123,000 (no cartridge), Walker Audio Proscenium Black Diamond Mk V $110,000 (no cartridge). Add a few good cartridges , a couple of top rate phono stages, a good isolation base and rack, some cables of this caliber and you’re talking real money.  So he was comparing the MSB digital gear to top shelf analog gear. 

So if you think that your turntable sounds better than the MSB Reference DAC and Transport in Valin’s system or that vinyl always sounds better than digital, you’re fooling yourself, and that will only get harder and harder to do as time goes on and digital continues its fast pace of improvement. But if you want to believe that vinyl is always better than digital or that digital is fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed, that’s OK with me.

Are you implying that the cost of the system determines the quality of the output? If that’s the case, I’ve never seen a $30k Birkin looks and feel better than $1k LV. They’re just more about something else rather than the functionalities.

I do not think that more money necessarily equals better sound. I think that when an audio professional who listens to a variety of audio gear all the time and communicates frequently with the people who design and build the gear spends $123,000 on a turntable and probably has it set up by the guy who designed it, there is a good chance it will sound better than one you pay $5,000 for and set up yourself.

I know that Valin doesn’t pay $123,000 nor would you pay list price for a $5,000 turntable. I’m just using the list prices for comparison purposes.