For me the jury is still out as to whether vinyl really is significantly better than CD. What I can say from personal experience that vinyl at it's very best is possibly better than digital at it's very best. But at the very least there is so much overlap in quality, I do often wonder if for practical purposes there really is a significant advantage.
When I was collecting vinyl over the last couple of years, of the 60 LPs I owed - all of them brand new audiophile reissues from top notch companies - I would say that perhaps 10 of them were better than the best CD mastering equivalents, 30 of them were about the same and 10 were far worse. This does not take into account pressing faults, surface noise, clicks, etc. It just takes into account the pure sonics whilst ignoring the physical flaws inherent in vinyl.
Sure, my vinyl front end was only worth about $2000, but I also think the returns start to significantly diminish past that point. In other words, I honestly don't think having a $5000 front end was going to make all the LPs sound much better than the CDs. And in any case, if we go upping the ante on the vinyl front end, it would only be fair to do so with the digital front end too - and I have never even had a high end digital front end.
Vinyl sure is a labour of love. There are so many disadvantages and they have all been discussed on various forums over the years. It's great when it works well, but if I think back to my listening days, I was really only happy with it around 25% of the time. The rest was frustration on account of all the disadvantages inherent in vinyl.
I remember having an email discussion with a very well respected vinyl remastering engineer. Without naming names, he was actually very "pro digital". He would always make a CD copy of his vinyl masterings (in the studio - direct from the source - not the vinyl or cutting chain itself). He maintained the CD was pretty much every bit as good as the vinyl. He also felt that high resolution digital was essentially balony too (quite a few professional engineers seem to think this) - something else I am coming to realise the more I hear. Given his remasterings are about the best in the business, I am really not in a situation to argue and it pretty much reflects my own experience.
The mere fact that there are a number of CDs in existence that sound absolutely tremendous ought to be proof enough there is nothing wrong with the digital medium per se and that the differences between that and vinyl should be extremely small indeed. I just remain perplexed as to why the vast majority of CDs I have ever heard sound absolutely terrible though. There is no need for them to be like that!
