When is digital going to get the soul of music?

I will second Frank's last post.

Tape Project tapes on my Ampex or vinyl on my SME 30 sound better to me than anything I've heard on any digital gear I have tried or any digital gear that I have heard.

I'm trying a MacBook pro with a Weiss DAC 1 right now and it's very, very good. It delivers the best that digital can offer however, it's still a shadow of the best analog.

The problem, in my opinion, lies not in the player but rather in the medium itself.

Based on that, and in answer to the question, it is my belief that digital can't get to the soul of music the way analog does.

My CD-based system got it. Each step was an improvement towards reproducing the soul of the music. Long, arduous journey, wading through lots of audio BS. For my system, it turned out to be tubes everywhere, even in the CDP. NOS tubes. And the most transparent cables I could get my hands on, which did no harm in other areas. My goal was always transparency, but with soul. If a new piece was more transparent than the old, but my system lost some of its soul, out it went. I always figured if I had to settle, I'd settle for soul over transparency. Fortunately, I did not have to settle. I have transparency WITH soul - and am thrilled.

Yeah, I'm with Rockadanny. I finally got what I consider superb headphone sound with my EMM SE separates and a Ray Samuels B52 amp with highly upgraded tubes and Stealth Indra ICs. With SACD or, say, the Beatles 2009 box, it's off the charts in quality to me (after a long line of annoying false starts with glare/piercing highs/muddy bass or hyped up detail). But tubes were the real breakthrough, especially great vintage/NOS ones. Tubes forever...

I'd like to mention that 192kHz applies to incoming signal while DACs have much lower THD distortions around 100kHz. For that reason Benchmark decided to ouput data to DAC at around 110kHz.