When is digital going to get the soul of music?

"Those of us who have open ears are the ones keeping analog alive"

Assuming we're talking about vinyl specifically, actually I think it is those of use with large existing record collections and those shopping for used vinyl that is keeping the equipment manufacturers alive at least.

It is nice to see a few new pressings in some of the stores these days though.

Mapman - we're not talkin about comparing CD to vinyl. I just reacted to statement that digital will never rival analog. LPs are made from digital recording last 20 years - how it can be better than its origin? I has to go from digital to analog thru the DAC and in addition thru LP, pickup, RIAA preamp. How LP can improve sound of original master tape I don't know. LP is pretty much dead - (about 1 million record total sold last year) and nothing new on the horizon. How anybody can know for certain that LP will never be surpassed by digital? The word "denial" comes to mind. As I said we're not talking about 44kHz CDs.

Muralmanl - pretty much everything is changing to oversamling (for better or worse). Analog Devices dropped almost all non-oversampling DACs, Class D amps are the same thing as sigma-delta modulator, SACD is oversampled recording and DDS studios started using for recording is like 4 channel SACD. I got first CD recorded from DDS and sound is beyond believe.

Kijanki, you just can't compare the sampling circuits of OS CDP's and class D. I have both. Every digital filtered CDP tried in this system failed miserably, including modified state of the art SACD players. All suffered from the same tightening of the stage, truncated decay, and lack of natural sonics. My NOS DAC is frightfully better. All witnesses concurred. One fellow , who witnessed his Modright Sony SACD's pinned by my humble DAC, went right out and bought an AMC CD-77 with variable filtering on the fly.

" LPs are made from digital recording last 20 years - how it can be better than its origin"

One might play signal processing tricks to achieve a certain sound but your right, it can't be better in the sense that information lost cannot be regained.

However, I'm finding that the vinyl LPs that I would have most difficulty parting with are those produced for the most part in the 50s and sixties. There was a lot of attention paid to making good recordings in many cases in those days before, as with most things, economics watered everything down.

However, I would consider transferring say an early 60's vintage RCA Living Stereo or Mercury Living Presence recording to digital CD format even, and I would not expect to loose much if anything.

There is no doubt in my mind that digital can and will surpass older techniques increasingly over time. It already does in many cases when apples/apples comparing two products in each category. There are other cases where the reverse is true, so generalized statements regarding "which is better" is again meaningless to me. They both work well today when done right and also both can sound like crap when done wrong.

My opinion regarding the original question posed is:

It already does in more cases than not.