Its not just a question of Vinyl vs. Digital.
Spend big money and effort on a problem and you will likely find success.
Music is emotional and so are audiophiles. This will affect the judgment of the comparison.
There are great differences between recordings, analog and digital. Many recordings on both formats leave much to be desired. Much more emphasis should be placed on recording technology. Quality of every part in the recordong studio, and mike placement etc plays a big role in the outcome. It is hard to fix a recording after it is done.
Redbook 16/44.1 is a standard that is very old, but acceptable to the great unwashed masses who are OK with mp3 and AM broadcast, and who thinks rap and techno is music.
SACD and DVDAudio is easily better than the old Redbook format but they failed commercially for the above reasons.
It would not cost much more to make than Redbook recordings.
Recording studios use higher resolution equipment and resample it down to Redbook standard. Bad. The masters likely sound better.
192KHz 32bit is easy today, and the distribution on discs is obsolete.
We need better source material, more life like and more natural sounding.
Higher sampling rates and bit resolution should be a snap with today's technology.
Copyrights will block the progress to better sound redistribution.
With good base technology reproduction should not be that hard nor super expensive.
Spending $120,000 to listen to truncated 16 bit audio just does not make sense.
