Digital offers: lower noise floor as a rule, convenience, ability to swap music with friends, no worry about tweaking turntable/cartridge parameters, and access to a vast range of music that will NEVER be available on vinyl.
Vinyl offers: the ability to inexpensively sample a vast array of older music, much of which will never be available on cd, indulgence in a ritual that helps you to remember music is more than background noise in our multi-tasking lives, and that effortless, palpable, organic, flowing musicality you have with vinyl.
If I have the option, I usually prefer vinyl when listening to rock and jazz. The limited dynamic range obscures the more limited signal/noise ratio of vinyl. Yes, there is the occasional exceptional classical lp that is eerily quiet, but no matter how well I dust & vacuum most lp's, there are ticks & pops that intrude on quiet sections. I also find it's easier to immerse yourself in long musical pieces when you aren't getting up every twenty minutes to change sides. On many older rock & jazz recordings, the mastering to cd's is inferior. Many recordings haven't been remastered after engineers began figuring out how to do digital right. Some remasters still are substandard to their original vinyl incarnations, as I was reminded last night listening to Van Halen's first album. Each medium's strenths and weaknesses are on display to varying degrees on every recording.
