Debussy's once said ”Music is the space between the notes“ and in my view there is some truth in the quote; it certainly highlights the fact that transients are essential, for without transients there would be no spaces between the notes.
But the timing of transients is absolutely vital from the psychoacoustic point of view as the perception of pitch, timbre, tempo and rhythm, instruments as separate entities and the location of instruments in 3D space depends totally on the timing of transients.
And digital audio most severe and enormous problem is the reconstruction of the timing of transients, when sampled data gets converted back to a continuous waveform. And that conversion back to a continuous waveform is when we get the errors in the timing of transients, with transient timing constantly shifting backwards and forwards - and these timing errors present a huge problem for the brain, so that we can't perceive the music properly. Now I have been aware of this issue since the early 1980's, as reading about how important the timing of transients was from psychoacoustic text books, and studying the mathematics behind sampling theory - it was clear that reproducing digital audio had major and fundamental issues.
Indeed, as time has gone by, and I have listened to more complex and capable WTA interpolation filters, I have found that the sensitivity of perception to the tinniest timing error is enormous. With the Quartet development, I have constantly been surprised at essentially miniscule timing errors can have huge perceptual impacts.
And it's the difference between music sounding like real instruments playing in a real space to some garbled, muddled and pale imitation of a musical event.
Going back to your question, yes many vinyl albums are today cut using Dave, but I am not aware of a list. Some years back someone estimated that 70% of the albums cut today in the UK used Dave, and that number has increased as more studios have bought Dave since.
