@ejr1953
It's hard to say exactly what is causing perceived "glare" by some vinyl fans with respect to digital. In the early days of digital as we've acknowledged above, steep filters were used to accommodate the sampling rate that was marginally above the frequency limit of human hearing. These filters were vulnerable to component tolerance changes over time - an even greater source of potential sound quality problems beyond the large phase shifts they introduced. With the advent of widespread oversampling in the industry - that problem essentially disappeared. But the underlying "improvements" of digital technology I believe may be more the cause of the alleged "glare" some complain about. By virtue of its extremely high precision, bandwidth, and linearity capabilities, digital audio has the ability to accurately render extreme high and extreme low frequency source material like never before. Vinyl encoding - although pretty wide bandwidth, never could provide the same dynamic range -especially at the frequency extremes. The signal had to be compressed to keep distortion generated at the stylus from skyrocketing - particularly at high frequencies. There were a host of other problems that CD technology ameliorated like the high frequency loss created when the tone arm approached the center of the vinyl album - due to a substantial reduction in effective stylus-over-groove speed. Baked in tonearm tracking error was another problem fixed. CD's went way beyond what most perceive to be the primary advantage - no contact laser light eliminating wear and tear degradation altogether. If you want to learn more about the myriad of headaches and limitations of vinyl, you can read about them here:
https://www.emusician.com/how-to/mastering-vinyl
The bottom line to my theory about perceived differences is that when you grow up listening to a technology that has all these limitations built in, when they are suddenly removed, the new changes (full capacity to render all dynamic high frequency content without measurable distortion) can be unsettling or "unwelcome". We tend to be creatures of habit that like what we're used to. Compounding this problem in the early days was that recording industry techniques were well established - you might even say entrenched. Added high frequency bias built into the recording approach could easily appear "hyped" in the new technology format. So it was important for recording engineers to find a new balance with the new technology and not stick with the same old mic /mixing techniques that worked before. This clearly didn't happen in all cases.
It's hard to say exactly what is causing perceived "glare" by some vinyl fans with respect to digital. In the early days of digital as we've acknowledged above, steep filters were used to accommodate the sampling rate that was marginally above the frequency limit of human hearing. These filters were vulnerable to component tolerance changes over time - an even greater source of potential sound quality problems beyond the large phase shifts they introduced. With the advent of widespread oversampling in the industry - that problem essentially disappeared. But the underlying "improvements" of digital technology I believe may be more the cause of the alleged "glare" some complain about. By virtue of its extremely high precision, bandwidth, and linearity capabilities, digital audio has the ability to accurately render extreme high and extreme low frequency source material like never before. Vinyl encoding - although pretty wide bandwidth, never could provide the same dynamic range -especially at the frequency extremes. The signal had to be compressed to keep distortion generated at the stylus from skyrocketing - particularly at high frequencies. There were a host of other problems that CD technology ameliorated like the high frequency loss created when the tone arm approached the center of the vinyl album - due to a substantial reduction in effective stylus-over-groove speed. Baked in tonearm tracking error was another problem fixed. CD's went way beyond what most perceive to be the primary advantage - no contact laser light eliminating wear and tear degradation altogether. If you want to learn more about the myriad of headaches and limitations of vinyl, you can read about them here:
https://www.emusician.com/how-to/mastering-vinyl
The bottom line to my theory about perceived differences is that when you grow up listening to a technology that has all these limitations built in, when they are suddenly removed, the new changes (full capacity to render all dynamic high frequency content without measurable distortion) can be unsettling or "unwelcome". We tend to be creatures of habit that like what we're used to. Compounding this problem in the early days was that recording industry techniques were well established - you might even say entrenched. Added high frequency bias built into the recording approach could easily appear "hyped" in the new technology format. So it was important for recording engineers to find a new balance with the new technology and not stick with the same old mic /mixing techniques that worked before. This clearly didn't happen in all cases.