When and how did you, if at all, realize vinyl is better?

Gosh, has it really been 16 years ago when Michael Fremer, vinyl pundit extraordinaire of Stereophile, pronounced his pick for the five best sounding rooms at CES. Four of them were digital systems. The fifth room was the monster Walker Audio/Kharma room, featuring the Walker Turntable and the Grand Kharma Ceramique speakers.

Once I heard CD first time in 1989(Master Of Puppets) I realized that it sounded worse than cassette so didn’t bother jumping on CDs till mid-90’s when more interesting music were released on CDs not vinyls.
In general more great music is still released on vinyl than on any other media

Back in 1985?, when I was still impulsive and purchased the first available CD player, there were two brands, a Kyocera that sounded like mud. The best thing that digital purchase did for me was kill my impulsive nature, instead of accelerate it like it can. Of course, digital has come a long way, but like others have stated, has never given me that toe-taping emotional involvement. I still get bored with it after awhile. Recently, I moved out my digital front end off my rack and over to my other system. When the software, network, NAS, DAC, USB to SPDIF Converter, whatever, start to misbehave, I can find nothing so inconvenient and frustrating when I just want to listen to my music. How easy it is just to plop on a record and enjoy. I also enjoy, getting up and flipping over the LP, but realize I can't walk away and listen to it like Muzak. Digital has it beat there, but I also have a radio for that. I do understand how so many find the sound of digital to be excellent, but it's not the sound I prefer.
Kenny

It always sounded better to me.

Early on using digital recorders, I noticed that there was this weird distortion, which is an intermodulation with the scan frequency. If you record with an analog sweep tone, its easy enough to hear the distortion. Radio Amateurs describe it as 'birdies'; little chirps and cheeps the accompany the actual sweep tone, clearly not there in the source!

This type of distortion is also called 'inharmonic distortion' as it is not harmonically related to the fundamental test tone.

But the digital world does not like the idea that digital can make a distortion (after all, traditional IM and THD are almost non-existent). So they call this distortion 'aliasing'.

The thing is, the ear converts all forms of distortion into tonality and is particularly sensitive to the frequencies where aliasing occurs; this is why digital tends to sound bright compared to the LP, which inherently lacks this form of distortion.

When we started mastering LPs I discovered that a lot of what I thought I knew about the format was incorrect. For example, you can find people that think LPs can have 'saturation' which is nonsense! Here's why: the mastering amplifiers typically can make about ten times the power needed to turn the cutter head into a cinder. But the cutter head can cut undistorted grooves that no tone arm and cartridge combo could trace long before that cutter is overheated! So its arguable that the LP has more headroom than any other format.

Now when a lacquer is cut, if the stylus is set up right with the right angle and temperature (its heated), the resulting cut has a noise floor that is so quiet that no matter what your playback electronics are they will be the noise floor. IOW the noise floor of a lacquer is easily in the same range as a CD. The noise comes in with analog tapes and the pressing process (QRP, Acoustic Sounds' pressing plant, has done exceptional work in this area BTW, rivaling the actual noise floor of the lacquers).

We also found that any LP record combined with playback system made since about 1960 or so can do 30KHz without difficulty. So the LP has had superior bandwidth for a very long time. Most of its distortion comes in during playback and that is one of its weaknesses. 

I and an audiophile friend realized vinyl was not better when we did direct testing vs. well-recorded CDs.

vinyl is often better than poorly recorded CDs such as the first few years of most releases when CDs made their debut

You will realize vinyl is better if you like snaps, crackles and pops.