Help me - am I stupid

Funny thing I find with Digital vs analogue is that with Digital you keep listening albums end to end whereas with digital you seem to skip - and its not just a matter of ease of skipping.
I went to a fascinating talk by the Editor of Stereo magazine at lat years high end show and he said its like the darkening of seismographs that always thicken and darken on a shift - the same occurs with the styli' going through digitally mastered grooves.
the few times I have heard high res I have found it much better than 44.1.
My point is that I find differences show over longer listens (lol - making my excuses early)

@lohanimal

The auditory recall for humans is about 10sec, so hearing “benefits” over time does not exist, what people generally hear is simple the nuances in the music they missed before, which is why people suggest demoing with songs who know like the back of your hand, it’s also why the headphone burn-in myth exists. If I played the same track 5 times for a group of people and told them I changed something, it’s bound to happen that someone will say they heard a difference.

The only possible benefit (see caveat in below paragraph) for higher than 44.1 is if your DACs digital filter does not perform well enough to filter out the audio above Nyquist, even though even “cheap” DACs usually don’t alter anything below 19kHz.

However, due to how MQA works, if your DAC is MQA compatible and it doesn’t use different filters for the format, then there may be some benefit to going 96kHz. If you look at the Mytek Liberty’s response with 44.1kHz (for a reference to a good response, see the Chord Qutest), you see higher aliasing occurring, which may drive your speakers into distorting (same probability with vinyl), depending on how well the tweeter handles high frequency (as well as your pre-amp and amp).

I see no benefit to MQA over lossless PCM, any seeing how most DACs that support MQA also degrades PCM performance (which is one reason why some people may hear a difference going from PCM to MQA on the same DAC), I choose not to get a DAC that supports MQA.

I concur with most of the above, except for the DSD comments.  Being recorded is DSD is no guarantee of sonic excellence, but I have many DSD recordings that are true musician in the room variety, and if you are coming from a strictly analog world you may wish to investigate them as many have called DSD “analogue like” whatever that means

@mzkmxcvasas 
as to the 10 second thing - I think we are at cross purposes. Simply put there are certain cues in analogue that I find red-book just does not do so as to make the music listenable - it never truly feels relaxed. 
I always wonder if cd has lower res than analogue - or is it the opposite - is it something else?
Al said and done my Cayin CS 55 CD is a very musical listen - 

By analog you mean vinyl? If so, CD has far better dynamic range and accuracy, it only loses to vinyl in terms of ultra-sonics (but I guess you can then say vinyl loses to 16/96 to 24/96 in that same regard), which while you can’t hear may cause the tweeters to distort.

There are no nuances that CD misses, 44.1kHz by proven by Nyquist-Shannon captures the 0Hz to 22050Hz range with 100% accuracy, not even 0.0000000...0001% loss.

I know some people who prefer the static of FM radio over the clean sound of CD, so while vinyl isn’t that poor, maybe it’s a similar thing for you.