Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

Al,
I used to argue that digital is a sampling of analogue but there are more fundamental issues. It is relatively easy to fill in the gaps using mathematical modelling.
The real issue with digital is the Red Book Standard and the use of sine x/x.
I'm sure you are aware the use of sine x/x means that all the calculations are truncated.
If they had used tan x for example the calculations would have yielded whole numbers and there would be no truncation errors.
My view is that digital is fundamentally flawed, not because of the concept, but due to the maths being incorrect and the way it has been implemented..
One of the biggest issues in developing digital product is that most audio engineers are engineers not mathematicians.

I am very used to hearing things that are hard to see on the oscilloscope. Interestingly, instrument manufacturers use a different rule for scanning a signal. The rule of thumb is 10x the highest frequency to be displayed.

This is quite different from what we see in audio, where Redbook only asks for 2x the highest frequency to be reproduced.

The instrument manufacturers use higher scan frequencies in order to maintain waveform fidelity. This is not the case in audio, seems to me that audio reproduction has been treated as the poorer cousin.

Atmasphere, I have to agree that audio does seem to get the short end of the stick, and has for a very long time. After all, it would seem to me that the original cylinders would be a better performing platform than the flatform record platters that replaced them.

The tapes were baked because they used a synthetic tape lubrication not whale oil based lubricant. Overtime they became unplayable. Record companies were in a frantic panic to find a solution. The solution? Bake the tape. It can be played back within I think 48 hrs. You can bake it again, but don't know how many times! Steely Dan goucho had to be re-baked to do the sacd version.

When you bake a tape, it takes a few years for it to regain the moisture chased out while baked. IOW, you have plenty of time to work with the tape- certainly more than 48 hours.

The reason you have to bake them has nothing to do with whale oil :) Modern tapes are made with polyesters, which can absorb moisture at the ends of broken molecular strands. The water molecule allows the magnetic substrate to come unglued. Baking chases out the moisture so the substrate can function normally.

Older tapes from the 1950s were made with acetate. Acetate does not have the moisture issue, so although they have less performance and break easily, they do store much better.