Quote:A lot of what you are describing is the result of a digital format not having enough bandwidth to accurately reproduce the input signal.  Of course, it's an approximation.  But there's no guessing involved, the missing parts are just skipped (or blurred).  But digital has infinite bandwidth.  If you want to reproduce a sound to the point where it's indistinguishable, in the digital world, you increase the bitrate to the point where the sound is indistinguishable from the analog signal.  The old standarnd 128kbs (i think) mp3s definitely had severe sound artifacts even compared to standard CDs.   CDs were way better at representing analog sounds (probably to the point where I wouldn't notice a different).   Then the common streaming formats we use right now are likely better than CDs at this point if I'm guessing.   But it's all about how much data you use to represent the signal and how good or nonexistent the format compression is, and how much digital bandwidth the human ear (which we already know has its limitations) can actually decipher. I'm sure people have maxed this out at least with lossless formats like WAV or FLAC or whatever.   But yes, if you're talking about specific formats that people commonly use, you could be right (even though I doubt I personally would notice a difference).  My whole point is that digitizing something at the right bandwidth could reproduce vinyl to the point where there is no human difference.      

 

We're basically saying the same thing with different conclusions.  Digitizing can produce sound almost identical to an analog recording in theory, but most digital formats don't go that far because of bandwidth restrictions.  The reality is that most digital music (be in CDA, MP3, m4a, ogg, or even the so-called lossless formats like FLAC, etc) will not sound as good as a decent vinyl recording because they're reformats of the source CD material.  On the other hand, if every digital track was reproduced from the analog source (as is Dolby True-HD), then I'd agree that vinyl records are redundant, but 99.99999% percent of digital music on the market aren't of that quality.

---