When is digital going to get the soul of music?

It has.....Ypsilon CDT-100 & DAC-100. This combo is on the same level as the best analog out there. Once you here this combination you will never look back at analog. There would be no need. It is that good, maybe even better.

I suspect that Double DSD will be very close to vinyl. And then there is Quad DSD which is what SONY is usings to archive their tape holdings before the tapes are all lost. Soon, Quad DSD files will be available. There will be nothing closer to achieve. The Sabre 9018 and 19 chips such as in the Oppo 105 can play Double DSD. The real question is getting the information from the hard drive to the dac.

Digital v analog, blah blah blah....this thread has been alive for years.

You can get the "soul of the music" on a stock FM radio in a Ford Focus at 65 mph if the attitude is right. Case in point; years ago I was driving on I70 north of Dayton, Ohio when a song I had never heard comes on the radio. It affected me so deeply I had to pull off at the upcoming exit to listen and find out what I was hearing. I got off the exit and went searching for a music store to purchase the cd. It was Jeff Buckley singing Hallalujah.

The soul of the music is not in the grooves, pits or digits, it's in the listener's heart (or mind for the logical thinkers).

Timrhu; I hear you and I am not in disagreement with you, however, :) I think you may be taking a different route than the meaning behind this post. I think we are more concerned with a great deal of digital devices NOT being able to capture the ethereal emotional content that music contains. It seems that pure analog sources have an easier time with this elusive non-quantized metric than digital does (although I am one to admit the newer turntables are sounding more and more sterile and less musical to me). I will say that I have heard some digital capture this magic and I believe my AMR DP777 is one of those units, but I still hear ultra expensive digital (like the $90K DA converter I recently listened to) which simply has no clue; I mean they can sound absolutely PRISTINE with all the resolution of an electron scanning microscope and absolutely sound NOTHING like music if you get my meaning :)

03-30-14: Audiofun
Timrhu; I hear you and I am not in disagreement with you, however, :) I think you may be taking a different route than the meaning behind this post. I think we are more concerned with a great deal of digital devices NOT being able to capture the ethereal emotional content that music contains.

I think if we were more concerned with listening to the music for the ethereal emotional content than listening to the device providing the music we might more easily realize that connection. My grandsons have no problem connecting to the soul of the music while listening to mp3s on their ipods or phones thru the crappy Apple headphones.

I still contend the "soul" of music is in the music and the heart of the listener. Not the playback device, no matter the quality. If the only way to get an emotional connection to the music is thru a perfect playback media we are in a sad state. Rather than listening to the device for flaws we should relax and as John Kay sang, "Close your eyes girl, look inside girl, let the sound take you away."

Nothing at all wrong with striving for the best playback of a recorded event. That is what this hobby is about.