Which is more accurate: digital or vinyl?

I have listened to some of the best turntables on the planet, clear audio statement, continuum labs, rock port series 3 (hope I remember all those names correctly).
what always bothered me even with quite new records was the noise levels namely pops and clicks. I can also always hear some tracking distortions from the needle going through the groove. Guess many people are not sensitive to these things because they have grown up with these noises and consider digital less musical because these things are missing.
That analog sounds as good as it does is quite surprising to me considering how much eq is applied before the lp is cut and after playback. Also when thinking about through how many amplification stages this tiny signal has to travel com pared to digital.
Just my personal opinion. to each his own!

Could it come down to one's preference between; sins of omission vs. sins of commission?

Duomike, even with the best turntable, if there are problems in the design of the phono section, ticks and pops will be abundant! This can have nothing to do with the actual LP BTW.

Mapman, the birdies I am referring to can be heard by anybody when you employ a sweep tone to ferret them out. Here is someone who discovered this phenomena by accident:

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-source/34329-cd-frequency-sweep-can-hear-birdies.html

It seems that the slower the sweep, the easier they are to hear. Now consider that this sort of thing (in-harmonic distortion) is going on all the time within the context of music during playback. The ear will interpret this as a brightness, even though some of the 'birdies' content can be low frequency.

To be more precise, the birdie tone is a non-linear manifestation of intermodulation between the scan frequency and the actual tone. As the tone changes frequency, so does the birdie tone. It is caused by poor dithering technique, poor monotonicity in the DAC, and other inter-modulations in the conversion process. I'm pretty sure the industry could have avoided a good bit of this had they been paying attention, but the assumption was that if the digital system had super low THD that is was therefore free of distortion. They just simply didn't *look* for any other forms until much later...

Ralph,

I run a recording studio so we see this sort of comparison all the time. I get asked, 'why do you have all this old analog crap?' all the time. I just sit them down and play the difference.

Ah...that was beautiful ;-)

Vbr,
Sam

How do you determine what "accurate" is?

I think as the hardware improves,we can hear improvents in the accuracy or both vinyl and digital formats.

What does seem to tip the hat infavour of digital is the promised master tape fidelity of hi res digital dowmloads.

I've heard a bit of this, and compared to an extremely more expensive SME 30/12,Clearaudio Strad cart,AR phono and 25 Anniversary,on Sonus Strad speakers and Nagra VPA amps,it was hard to tell if one was any more accurate than the other.

The real fly in the ointment, was that for the first time, digital was as good or better than the full blown vinyl set up in this system.

Never thought a vinyl guy like myself would ever say that, but that's what I heard.