Are Digitally mastered LPs any better than CDs?


It seems to me a vinyl album that was mastered digitally would be the worst of both worlds - the digital effects would still be present,overlaid with surface noise, dust pops, no convenience features (remote control track skip, etc). I suppose if you don't have a great digital front-end, the record could sound like a CD playing on a much better CD player than you have. Or maybe if the digital master was a hi-res format, your record could sound like an SACD playing on a very high-end player, overlain with surface noise. Am I missing something?
honest1
Agree with above posters. I have some digitally recorded LPs that are great. I think it helps a great deal just to avoid the errors possible in home digital playback. Even though I'm biased toward all analogue LPs, I try to listen with an open mind and many times I'm quite surprised.
Good summary by Johnnyb53. Sampling rates when cutting/pressing vinyl are unlimited and bandwidth is far greater than RBCD. Another point, there's no need for the brickwall filter at 22kHz, which is a part of every RBCD and player. That filter causes audible harmonic distortions, one reason so many RBCDs sound harsh in the upper mids. Vinyl doesn't have that problem either.

Record surface noise is inversely proportional to record cleaning, record care and the quality of the playback equipment, including the phono stage. Get all those right and your records will be quiet, though no one should think this will be easy or cheap - it's neither.

I have hundreds of digital LP's that sound better than any CD or SACD. DVD-A can give vinyl a run, but there are so few titles it's not worth the cost of a playback deck that would match my vinyl rig.

Ultimately, as Eweedhome said, listen for yourself and decide. Try to listen to rigs that you could aspire to owning. If your budget were (say) $5,000, it might not help much to listen to $500 rigs, or $50,000 ones either.
I read somewhere that good engineers never downconvert high-rez digital masters directly to 16/44. What they do is record the high-rez master to analog tape 1st, then transfer the tape to 16/44, eliminating distortions that occur during downsampling.

Of course, going to vinyl directly from hi-rez digital should sound better than 16/44 digital.
What Photon46 said! That's my experience exactly. For me, a "digitally recorded" classical record may not be my first choice, but it's not a deal-killer. I have several that are very musically satisfying, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?
These include a young Josh Bell playing violin concertos, a recital album by Kiri Te Kanawa, several Mozart piano concertos on Hungaraton, and the Romero brothers tearing it up on classical guitar.

I also went to the trouble of getting an LP off eBay UK of the digitally recorded "Question and Answer" jazz trio by Pat Metheny, Dave Holland, and Roy Haynes. It is one of my very favorites. My digitally recorded Geffen LPs sound pretty good to me.

They'll never supplant "Kind of Blue," "Muddy Waters, Folk Singer," or the analog-recorded Diana Krall LPs though.
Probably the best way to listen to a digital master is with a vinyl LP. Digital is a brittle, lossy medium that doesn't transfer well to the home media, in spite of the "bitz is bitz" claims. Digital becomes drier, edgier and more jittery the further it gets from the masters, whereas analog retains warmth and fullness even with generational losses. I have a couple of LPs that sound quite a bit better than their CD counterparts, even with digital mastering and mixing.
Some LPs from the early to mid 80's can sound like crappy CDs, but a lot of digital LPs are quite desirable, such as the Philips classic digitals and the GRP label associated with Dave Grusin.
Try getting a hold of one of Billy Cobham's GRP LP releases, that sound like they have very little if any compression. You will probably not inherently object to digital mastering in and of itself after hearing one of those. The GRPs can have very quiet surfaces and wide dynamics.
One of the most prominent of the "digital LPs" is Dire Straits "Brothers at Arms". I don't hear many analog lovers complaining much about that one.