I think the original question posed by the OP, in itself proves the point that its taken a long time for digital to get on par with a good analog playback. Outside of listening to music live and unless you had a mastering quality reel2reel in your living room, for most of us oldtimers the baseline and the frame of reference for sound quality has always been vinyl sound. So, it is true that it's taken many years for digital to win the competition with analog and in some respects win it. Moving parts always cost more so it'll take a lot more money to build an analog rig that can compare with a digital one in terms of sound quality.
