CDs Vs LPs

You are either joking, or perhaps have just become accustomed to compression

I am not joking. Check out any recording from SF Symphony Media, or AIX records, or Chesky Records, or ECM, or BIS, and I could go on and on and on. Almost no classical music recordings not mastered for vinyl are compressed.

I like modern classical recordings on digital media.  I do think they tend to be well recorded and mastered and have a dynamic range that is decent, compared to recordings done in the past and offered on vinyl.  But, that is not to say that they are not compressed. 

Compression is used for practical reasons, particularly with orchestral music.  There would be almost no system that could really handle the full dynamic range and most people would not like listening at whisper quiet levels for most of the music in order to have the peaks not be at an overwhelmingly high level.  I have a few CDs that were mastered without compression; they have warning labels all over the case and the CD because of the possibly damaging peaks if one played the soft parts at normal levels.  Of course, anything without compression would be unlistenable in a car, so that would be taken into account when mastering a classical CD.

@dynaquest4 and @cleeds you are glossing over the fundamental issue with going digital: it does not capture the infinite range of undulations. Rather, the process quantizes the input program material at the sampling frequency, and then stores it as a sequence of discrete samples.

What you are mistakenly thinking of, is the reverse process, taking that stored sequence of samples and generating a facsimile of the original analog program material, doing bit-sum averaging to compensate for dropouts. 

Perhaps this is the missing information you needed to see why digital is inherently flawed. 

sleepwalker: Assuming your post is scientifically accurate, I'd opine that you are addressing facets of the recording process that are well beyond the ability of the human ear to detect.  Therefore, to me, irrelevant. 

The video that @cleeds referred to is heavily slanted toward trusting that the conversion back to analog fills in the missing pieces with a perfectly synthesized replacement. The human ear is not capable of discretely differentiating the bonafide program material from artificial. Put another way, not capable of seeing the forrest for the trees.

As as a person who can’t put on the blinders and “un-see” what I know, I cannot accept that 16 bit depth with 44kHz sampling even approaches the principle of high fidelity sound reproduction (ie: don’t alter the program material).

That is not to say that there isn’t a purpose for CD in my life. It’s just a distant third choice, because of the nature of what it is, to vinyl and analog tape done properly. Sadly, after you learn that there is no Santa Claus, the ritual of gifting becomes as hollow as the sound of 16/44 digital.