Analog vs Digital Confusion

I was trying to avoid the endless debate here over which is better in any absolute sense, and attempting to address the questions of a possible new entrant into vinyl as to what to expect. We could fight endlessly over the digital v analog debate, and I'm not sure that's productive. For what it's worth, I am vinyl only, but if I didn't have more than 40 years of records accumulated, and was on a budget, I'm not sure that vinyl is the right way in~ unless a substantial measure of top level vinyl performance can be achieved on a modest budget. That was the previous question I posed....

Rpg ... to my knowledge, there is a master produced for the cutting of vinyl and a separate master with different specs to make a cd or digital file.

Analog is better. You get a better variety of music during a listening session. The short play time of LPs forces you to change the record every 20 minutes or so. CD play time is too long.

If you listen exclusively to contemporary music recorded and processed digitally, which most of it is these days, then probably there is little benefit in investing in a turntable, and the records released concurrently with their CD counterpart likely will not sound better, everything else being equal.

But, as Frogman's post discussed even if indirectly, it's an entirely different thing if we're talking about music that was originally recorded using purely analog technology to be released on vinyl exclusively, which is essentially most of, if not all, classic jazz and classic rock. Digital technology might have made a huge progress, but I disagree with opinions that digital can sound as good as analog when it comes to the music originally destined for vinyl only. To me, sonic superiority of vinyl there is unmatched and every effort should be made to listen to it as it was meant to be - on a turntable.

P.S.
The assumption is of course that the records are the original releases, not dubious reissues, which is an entirely different subject...

I believe that if you are talking about CD only, digital can never compare to analog. Just the process of mixing down to 44khz ruins it, even from the same master.