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

Ralph, you have been probably the most consistently knowledgeable, helpful poster here (the whole forum) for the past decade or more (despite your biases - many of which I share).

The post above is very interesting.  Something along those lines definitely jives with my experience with digital music - there is something unnatural about it that no amount of expense or technology can seem to completely eradicate.  

With really good digital you won't notice it right away, which is one reason rooms with digital sources can win "Best of Show" awards, but it is always there in the end.

This includes digital recordings of vinyl made at high PCM resolutions and sample rates or DSD128 and studio-quality equipment.  You may think it sounds indistinguishable at first (I did), but eventually, once you are trained, you can hear, immediately, what it is that never fails to get to you over time.

The experience points to information uncorrelated with the input signal, as you say.

The way I look at it: the ticks and pops (which can be minimized with good phono preamp design, as a poor design will have a lot more ticks and pops) exist in space separate from the music. With digital, the coloration is inherent in the music itself.

Regarding the former: if the preamp is unstable, ticks and pops are exacerbated. This is nothing to do with bandwidth- its possible to design a phono preamp with 100KHz response and still have it be stable.

When I listened to a CD and was astonished by the spectacular sound and fidelity, then put a LP on and was astonished by the sound of a performance.

When CD was introduced;My friends and I didn't buy into it. We had too many LPs. A few yrs later, (3-4) , a couple of the guys each bought a player and their first CDs. Their take on it was that there were No tics and pops, better bass, better cymbals (?), and Long playing time.
 I didn't buy into it. I bought the LP12 that I still use. It blew me away! Records sounded better than ever. That was the start of my high end journey.

I knew vinyl was better when I saw this:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/love-the-world-s-first-intelligent-turntable-music-design--2#/