Does Anyone Think CD is Better Than Vinyl/Analog?

Thoughts from the dark side.
Of course it is, why do you even need to ask the question. Just look at the hassle you go through to purchase, maintain and play vinyl. Look at the pain you go through to set up a high end turntable! Then there’s finding the perfect pressing or long sought album, only to get it home and find it off centered, warped and twisted with a nice noisy run-out (ah don’t mention surface noise)! Then there’s storage (spare room anyone), cleaning them before use and of course if your are serious you have your ~$3K Degritter record cleaner!
And we are supposed to believe that a Turntable with its power supply, tone arm, cartridge, stylus, tone arm cable, phono cable, phono stage, excluding vodo record mats, dampers and isolation issues is really better?

Hi end vinyl is pressed the same way cheap vinyl used to be - by hand! Modern cheap vinyl is pressed automatically. I used to work for a record pressing company (many years ago) and did Quality Control for the physical presses (rather than the sound quality), so I had plenty of first hand experience of trying to produce decent vinyl and procure it for my collection. Anyone that thinks their vinyl is flat think again!
As soon as Meridian produced their MCD Pro, I stopped buying vinyl and gradually replaced the vinyl I had with CD’s.
So when you say "better", for me it’s never even been a question. And, the quality/musicality of digital audio is (and has been) gradually tracking upwards. Given how long "LP’s" (in their various incarnations) have been around, digital audio is, well not nascent, but still improving.

I’ve been doing studio quality LP to digital (CD) transcription and remastering, often for commercial release, for nearly 25 years. It’s been an interesting and insightful journey.

Technically, there is no reason whatsoever why Red Book CDs shouldn’t be superior to LPs in nearly every respect. Not that it’s perfect, but digital signal communication is superior in essentially all ways to analog.There are far more possible audio pitfalls along the way in the analog production of LPs from initial recording to playback. That the medium has been so perfected over the decades is remarkable.

THAT SAID, there are several often overlooked points where digital sound recording and production can be problematic, and where LPs have some ameliorating features.

FIRST, technically, jitter results from a very slight variation in the sample clock rate. In most cases, jitter is a non-issue that can and should be ignored. HOWEVER, any jitter that occurs during analog to digital conversion becomes hard coded into the digital file and AFAIK there is no way to remove it. Any mathematical manipulation of that jittery file necessarily assumes that the sample rate is completely constant. Thus, jitter can increasingly distort the digital sound as it’s processed, and it gets significantly worse the more times the music is bounced from digital to analog and back to digital as often happens in many studios. For the first few decades, ADC was often very jittery yet this problem was largely ignored. The result was that both DDD recordings and digital sound boards somehow just didn’t "sound right." Current technology has reduced jitter to vanishingly low levels so it’s ceased to be so much of a problem in digital recording for the last decade or so.

SECOND, very well produced and mastered digital recordings can sound unnaturally perfect. No one sits at the perfect distance from every instrument and vocalist in a perfect acoustic environment. Older LPs especially can sound more "real" simply because they haven’t been overly perfected.

THIRD, digital technology is wondrously powerful, but like the sorcerer’s apprentice it’s all too easy for it to be abused and get away from one in manifold ways. The "loudness wars" are but one infamous example. Again, the results can be untoward in ways that were never possible with analog recording and playback.

FOURTH, the types of distortion and significant limitations in analog recordings, LPs especially, are often rather congenial to the ear. Digital recording has a number of other technical concerns besides jitter which, while typically occurring at much lower and minimal levels, can be more subtly disturbing to the ear due to the intrinsic transparency and low noise floor of the digital medium. In this case, digital’s advantage may be something of a disadvantage.

LASTLY, there’s stochastic resonance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance_%28sensory_neurobiology%29 Simply put, a certain amount of completely random noise can serve to amplify an otherwise undetectable low level signal. I’ve never seen this considered here, but I believe it’s a very significant reason why many people enjoy LPs and tapes. It’s that low surface noise or tape hiss that allow a person to more sense than hear that "inner detail" or whatever. Stochastic resonance in analog and biological systems is somewhat analogous to dither in digital systems. In any case, I find that completely removing the surface noise from an LP transcription has a rather "deadening" effect to the sound. A small bit of surface noise seems to really help.

There. Enough. Just one more little thing for millercarbon. I just sold my old Technics SL-1700, still in good working order, two months ago. Got good money for it!

mijostyn said:
   "In the future all music will be downloaded."
Yes, and some years back, many said that analog was dead. I think that in the future, there will be quality CD players available for those who want them.   

Both mediums have their up and down sides. I've largely switched over to Redbook CD's due to several factors, even though to my ears vinyl sounds more natural. 

1) The pops, clicks and and other surface noises of vinyl are too distracting and appear even on albums that look to be in perfect condition.
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2) As mentioned above, you can play a whole album through without having to get up and flip it  over, which does distract you from enjoying what you are listening to. CD's do usually have more playing time too than their vinyl equivalents

3) Used CD's are usually in perfect shape and stay that way. Used records not so much. Used CD's that play flawlessly are readily available at a fraction of the cost of new vinyl records. I don't bother any more with used vinyl due to both the likelihood increased surface noise with age plus used records cost.

4) As mentioned by Gone, above, there appears to be more material available on CD, especially of more obscure recordings. 

6. I could be wrong here, but there seems to be a lot of remastered CD's that correct some of the limiting factors of the original vinyl pressings with the remastering onto CD's. I recently read an article of what those factors are, maybe compression, but I can't remember for sure. Maybe someone else here would know.

7  You can't beat the ease of use of CD's, and don't need a record cleaning machine for them like you should use with your records. 

Mike

Another +vote for the CD.

Happy Listening!