Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

With the influences that friction, drag and vibration have on vinyl, is it possible that part of the appeal of vinyl is that (like tube amps) it can be tuned to the listeners taste?

Atmasphere - thank you, thank you, thank you. Most people can indeed hear digital artifacts just fine, when they have a decent analog system to compare it with. Many musicians like myself have been trying in vain to convince people of what you are saying in this thread without the benefit of your technical knowledge to back ourselves up. You state such things in layman's terms better than anyone else I have ever read. I also like this: "The real question is, no matter how good the digital, 'what would this have sounded like if an analog recording system was used?" I could not agree more.

I have listened to some of the best turntables on the planet, clear audio statement, continuum labs, rock port series 3 (hope I remember all those names correctly).
what always bothered me even with quite new records was the noise levels namely pops and clicks. I can also always hear some tracking distortions from the needle going through the groove. Guess many people are not sensitive to these things because they have grown up with these noises and consider digital less musical because these things are missing.
That analog sounds as good as it does is quite surprising to me considering how much eq is applied before the lp is cut and after playback. Also when thinking about through how many amplification stages this tiny signal has to travel com pared to digital.
Just my personal opinion. to each his own!

Could it come down to one's preference between; sins of omission vs. sins of commission?

Duomike, even with the best turntable, if there are problems in the design of the phono section, ticks and pops will be abundant! This can have nothing to do with the actual LP BTW.

Mapman, the birdies I am referring to can be heard by anybody when you employ a sweep tone to ferret them out. Here is someone who discovered this phenomena by accident:

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-source/34329-cd-frequency-sweep-can-hear-birdies.html

It seems that the slower the sweep, the easier they are to hear. Now consider that this sort of thing (in-harmonic distortion) is going on all the time within the context of music during playback. The ear will interpret this as a brightness, even though some of the 'birdies' content can be low frequency.

To be more precise, the birdie tone is a non-linear manifestation of intermodulation between the scan frequency and the actual tone. As the tone changes frequency, so does the birdie tone. It is caused by poor dithering technique, poor monotonicity in the DAC, and other inter-modulations in the conversion process. I'm pretty sure the industry could have avoided a good bit of this had they been paying attention, but the assumption was that if the digital system had super low THD that is was therefore free of distortion. They just simply didn't *look* for any other forms until much later...