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

Effischer well written indeed and it mirrors my observations. I also feel as Atmasphere notes, there is generally an inherent brightness in cd playback that I don’t hear with vinyl. Vinyl doesn’t always sound better than CD playback, but it generally is MUCH more listenable and at its best sounds more natural and complete at every level, you don’t feel like anything is missing. The bottom line for me is that my listening sessions are longer, I’m more involved with the music and less so with the sound than with digital in general.

We recently had a friend and his wife visit us for an extended period. He is not an audiophile but really loves a variety of musical forms. I played both digital and vinyl recordings in a variety of genres. He made an unsolicited comment that the digital sounded "synthetic" relative to records.

In the future the best vinyl will have Graphene in it.

LPs are the best i knew this 40 yrs ago been collecting records ever since then have a great CD player when I'm reading newspapers or Absolute Sound and Stereophile etc.

If they put caffeine in the vinyl I might come back to the fold:)

If I want caffeinated vinyl I just go to starbux...

But seriously, I've been building a system for the past few years, piece by piece, trying to understand what "good sound" is, and how the different parts of a system effect the outcome. I've tried to be neutral about tubes vs solid state and analog vs digital. In the end i'm a tinkerer, not an ideologue, so it doesn't really matter to me which side wins out. Or so I like to believe :)

Anyway 4 years later I have a system built around an SET amp (Art Audio Jota) with an analog front end (modded VPI Aries 1) that has just come into its own with the addition of a Doshi Alaap phono stage. On the digital side I have a Baetis server running into a Chord Hugo DAC fed by a fancy Revelation Audio S/PDIF cable. I'd say they're roughly comparable on the audio hierarchy (?), though I've put way more time (and enjoyment) into the analog side (and money!). But the digital side sits largely dormant. The spouse recently looked at it and said "that shelf is for the defunct stuff."

So why does it end up that way? I like the digital well enough, but there's just something very different about it. Like @effischer  I don't know how to define it, and like @dentdog it just happens naturally as I'm listening. I gravitate to the vinyl and focus in; I 'enjoy' the digital while i'm doing other stuff, but it doesn't grab me. High res files help, but only so much. The best I can say is that it's like the difference between the reproduction of a famous painting and the experience of seeing the real thing. They ain't the same.

I think @gregkohanmim may have a point - the analogy in the method of production of the sound (physical object creating vibrations, rather than a software algorithm) may be the key. Yes we humans are very smart, but sometimes we claim victory before we've really got it right. I'm sure digital will some day (maybe soon) eclipse the sound potential of analog playback. But it'll be a good while before a $4 sound file sounds anything like a good $4 used LP! and for me that ends up making a huge difference.