A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met. The interchannel timing accuracy of an LP is way out of the league of the Best digital out there.

This was known by the mid 90’s.

In complex harmonic signals, which is what music is.... the human hearing..meeting that spec with digital... might require a minimal sample rate of a few million samples a second.

Just to hear a single short bell tone in proper space, acoustically, in a triangle or equilateral set up of listener and speakers, at 8 feet apart, etc..a digital system would have to sample at a minimum of 225k samples er second, at a 20 bit depth, with ZERO jitter. that’s a minimum, for a single short pure tone. If the point source seems to move to the ears, by one inch of placement in space and we can hear that easily (we can!)..well..that ’s the minimum spec (225/20) required to get that out properly.

Now add in an entire orchestra and accompanying space.

We were discussing this on line and arguing about it, again, by the mid 90’s. On the bulletin board systems in the "rec.highend" discussions.

None of these critical specs have miraculously changed.

Neither has the argument from those espousing digital as superior. Such arguments don’t take into account the ear and how it works, nor do they take into account the fundamental physical specifications of an LP, in a complete way.

It’s the standard case of cherry picking one’s ignorance into a false premise.

23-24 years later these tedious arguments still come around.

Other than you, who has made this claim? You’re suggesting that an LP can hold more data than a CD. That simply isn’t even remotely true.

It’s the mechanical aspects of the LP’s capacity to hold transient phase coherence, timing coherence of the same, across the two channels.

Since this is deeply connected to how the ear works, it tends to be fundamentally important. To the ear. if you look at how the ear works, this little bit of a point becomes critical.

If one wants to equal the inter channel timing of transients and phase coherence that an LP is capable of, the minimum is an approximate 7 million sample per second rate, at about a minimum of 20 bits of depth and with absolutely zero jitter in dc to lightspeed bandwidth. This was known and spoken of in the early 90’s. Odd that it is somehow forgotten or not mentioned.

Look at the whole question and answer set. Math is nice and is a great descriptor of things, as a tool or what not. But it cannot do anything in being a tool unless the tool user is equipped with the correct questions and the math is shaped well enough to be useful in those calculations. In other words one has to have to have the right question in front of them. Most folks don’t. Thus the circular arguments.

eg, if one thinks that this spec is not important as it is swamped by noise, wow and flutter, etc, one might remind them that the world’s finest FFT and intelligent filtering system known, is built right into them. The human body creates an incredible amount of noise for the ear. The ear/brain system filters this out. So much so we are not consciously aware of this huge wobbly and insanely polluted noise floor inside our own hearing.

The ear as being dumb and the instrument and math smarter, more capable? It would be difficult to be more wrong, if one said or thought such a thing.