Early digital recordings on vinyl vs. CD?

I have a few of these and they are very nice recordings so I wouldn't necessarily avoid them. In general I think they are better than the CD but I tend to prefer vinyl to cd anyway. But as always it is recording dependent.

Chuck

Some of my favorite performances are on such records, for example, nearly all of Hogwood's output on l'Oiseau Lyre and most of Harnoncourts's survey of the Bach cantatas. I have both CD and LP copies of many such. In my system (listed) not only is the vinyl far superior to the CD, it rivals or exceeds the best analog-recorded LP's. I routinely use such recordings for critical listening, equipment comparisons, etc. They're among the best LP's I own.

Its an error to assume that *recording* digitally necessarily impairs sonics. Most of the problems we hear result from flawed *playback* technologies, not from the recording. The worst case, obviously, is highly compressed MP3. Next worst is Redbook CD. SACD is better. At the top end, I have DVD-As, Blu-ray HD discs and digitally recorded LPs that rival or exceed any analog-recorded LP for sonics. There's nothing inherently inferior in a digitally recorded source.

Vinyl mastering/cutting engineers could and did ignore the bit-rate compression and brickwall filters mandated by the CD Redbook standard. Those are the primary causes of crappy CD sound. They don't affect vinyl releases at all.

I have ~4,000 LPs and many of the best were recorded digitally. Don't hesitate.

Many thanks! This opens up a world of new wonders - Pinnock's Brandenbergs, Gilbert & Schiff playing the Well Tempered Klavier, Uchida's Mozart Sonatas, Brendel's Haydn sonatas etc...

There are a tremendous number of outstanding classical performances on record from the 1980's available on 'digital vinyl'. I will avoid them no longer!