When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Ptss - I have some old R2R transfers to digital including Sinatra, Take 5, and Ella F. and these have tape hiss. On my system, the brain masks it out pretty fast because it is centered in the image and unmoving.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Very nice albums to have. Pretty hard to notice tape hiss with all that music going on.

Digital is definitely there; and has been since at least 2005.
With supreme power conditioning-for the digital - clarity, dynamics, detail, delicacy and musicality are available from my rather modest (well, not particularly highly rated) Lexicon RT-20 through my reference Spectral & MIT gear. My reference for this is my Goldmund turntable. More info to follow.

Digital compare to a good tape deck is akin to the steak in the movie The Fly that gets teleported from one pod to the other. When the steak is recovered from the second pod it's grilled up and tasted. But it tastes terrible, not like a steak, something happened on the way to the second pod.

Today's digital recordings are much better than they were 10 years ago. In addition, with FLAC becoming available online (see http://tidalhifi.com/sc), one only needs a good DAC that can take USB transfer from a computer and the rest is essentially history. To me, the price and complexity of a turntable, its artificial "warm" sound, lack of details when there is more than 3 instruments, cracking and popping sounds and lack of good quality vinyls are all sufficient reasons for me to stay away from Vinyl.

In my opinion, the very subjective "soul of the music" argument made by vinyl owners seems to be there so that they can justify to themselves that their exorbitant investment was worth it. If you listen to live instruments, good quality digital is much closer to reality than Vinyl, but then again, maybe reality is not as “Soulful” as vinyls…