Analog vs Digital Confusion


Thinking about adding Analog to my system, specifically a Turntable, budget is about 5K but I'm having some second thoughts and I'm hoping someone can help, specifically, how can the record sound better? Scenario; an album is released in both CD and Record, the recording is DDD mixed, mastered, etc in the digital domain. It seems to me that to make the master record the process would involve taking the digital recoding and adding an additional D/A process to cut the record? So, bottom line, how can the record sound better than the CD played on compitent CDP?
rpg
If you have $5k to blow give analog a try. If nothing else, it will increase your audiophile credibility.
If you do go analog please revisit this thread in a couple years and give us an honest assessment. BTW, I am another who grew up with vinyl. Although I still own a couple hundred lps, I listen exclusively to digital via Mac Mini or cdp.
Both, depending on the quality of your equipment and of the recordings - digital sounds great before it is down-sized to fit onto a CD. If you can get the hi-res digital files, they sound great. If the recording companies use the high res digitial files to create an analog vinyl record (LP), it will sound better than a cd since more information can be stored on an LP than on a CD. If the original performance was recorded in analog, processed in analog, and stored on an LP; a digital recording of that will never sound as good as the original analog. If you have a digital recording that is say 24-bit and it is recorded onto an LP, it will not sound as good as the 24/192 digital version.
I think that some people respond to vinyl and some don't see it. The only way is to try it yourself, but I don't think you need to spend a ton of money up front. When I decided to get back into vinyl, I purchased a Music Hall MMF-5 table for about $700 and a Music Hall Phono stage for about $125. I compared it to my $10K digital player and, despite the the 10/1 price ratio, I immediately recognized analog's virtues. I now have a significantly more expensive vinyl setup, and I feel the improvements are commensurate with the cost, but I still think that little Music Hall was good enough to hear what was going on. So I recommend you spend $1000 or so and find out if you like it. Worst case - you'll dump it for $500-$600 and chalk it up to experience. IMO.
Frogman, Learsfool, and others whose focus is classical music on vinyl: I would encourage you to try to find some of the unfortunately out of print classical CD's that were issued some years ago on the Wilson Audio label (yes, that Wilson). Especially those featuring piano music. You just might find yourselves in a state of amazement at how good the CD medium is capable of sounding, when the recording is engineered to exceptionally high standards.

Of course, the production of those recordings was not exactly run of the mill. From the liner notes which appear on some of them:
The recorded perspective of the piano in this recording is close, as though the 9' Hamburg Steinway in being played for you in your living room. Of course the actual recording was not made in a living room! Instead, the great room of Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch, with its incredibly low noise floor and fully adjustable acoustics, was used.... A pair of Sennheiser MKH-20 omni microphones were employed ... amplified by two superb pure class-A microphone preamps custom-built for Wilson Audio by John Curl. MIT cable carried the balanced line level signal to Wilson Audio's Ultramaster 30 ips analog recorder. Subsequent digital master tapes were made through the Pygmy A/D converter on a Panasonic SV-3700.
In addition to many of the CD's in that series, I have one on LP, featuring music for piano and clarinet. Does it sound better on my system than the CD's? I would have to say that it does, but only to a very very slight degree, with the differences being apparent mainly on very sharp transients. And while I certainly recognize that as Frogman indicated individual sensitivities vary widely, IMO/IME differences of that magnitude would be swamped by the deficiencies that are present in the vast majority of lesser recordings, regardless of format.

Personally, I enjoy both formats, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the quality of the particular recording.

Best regards,
-- Al
If you are interested in rather new music that is digitally mastered, you are better off sticking with digital. If you are interested in music from the best era...1950's-1970's where the music is mastered analog, then a turntable makes sense....my two cents.