How much do you need to spend to get digital to rival analog?

You only answered a very small portion of the question I asked and effectively ignored the most significant part of it.

As well, are you implying it would be impossible to build an analog limiter that soft-clips like magnetic tape and put that in the circuit before the A/D?   (not that that would have been needed in the last 20 ish years with 24 bit A/D with 20+ bits effective for studio equipment)

sadono91 posts11-05-2019 11:40pm@atdavid

Serious question for everyone. How do you reconcile claiming that vinyl is technically better ... not euphonically better, but technically better, when the vast majority of recordings made in the last 2 decades have been recorded on digital? Even where the original is analog, many remasters have been remastered via digitization? At some level, Vinyl is just another "DAC" for many records.

Digital recording is non-destructive and far easier to use. That said, there are still a select group of studios and artists that still record using reel-to-reels.

Reel-to-reels have a soft clipping nature, as it reaches 0. Those analog recordings keep part of their characteristic sound, even if they’re converted to digital and processed digitally. This is why some mixing and mastering engineers will transfer their mixes/masters to reel-to-reel, before - or as - their final format.

@idigmusic64
I think you mean 20HZ to 20kHZ and 20HZ to 50kHZ

For me, It was how much would I need to spend to get my analog system to rival my digital. I had a $1000 cd player, and it took a outlay  of about $2500 in turntable, tonearm, and cartridge to level the playing field. No bliss in cheap analog systems.

The Innous Statement server with the Nagra HD DAC is good and would compare favorably to a high end analog (turntable) front end.

As you suggest Mike Stereophile did this interview back in 1995. I remember listening to the very first Sony CD player at a friend's shop in Akron, Ohio through Krell electronics and Magnapans. It sounded pretty poor. But, cassettes sounded a lot worse and people flocked to them because they were not vinyl and you could play them in your car. CDs were even more convenient and had the potential to outperform cassettes, were not vinyl and they would soon be playable in car audio systems. It was obvious they were going to take off whether or not audiophiles like them. After all we are a very small proportion of the market. Now it is MP3 downloads. It would be three years before Accuphase would make a CD player I could listen to. I suspect it had a fair amount of harmonic distortion added in because it was very tube like.
Still, the best records had better dynamic range. Then came the volume wars (dynamic compression) which IMHO ruined the sound of most popular CDs. Fast forward to High Res digital 96 or 192/24 PCM and recordings that were mastered for this and you have a whole different ball game. Even old analog recordings that were remastered in digital can sound fabulous. In many instances it is only because the original master was poorly engineered. But, better is better. 
The normal background noise on vinyl excluding the rare scratch or loud pop I find not to be objectionable at. It is dithering your brain and in some ways, believe it or not makes the music more realistic. When have you been to a concert with no background noise? Never. People talking coughing, shuffling around, chairs squeaking and the -ss behind you that has to whistle after every song. Vinyl is actually quiet in comparison!
The quietness of digital is actually spooky, sterile. You know you are listening to an artificial recreation because there is no noise. Is this one of the reasons I prefer live recordings? Maybe. 
There is more behind this than the technical aspects and this issue is highly multi-factorial. Gross characterizations do not work and anyone making them has a hidden bias.