- The correct answer nobody wants to give is vinyl always sounds better because even if all you do is drag a stylus through it this at least is analog, and analog beats digital, full stop period.
I feel that it is not really relevant what the source of the new recording was, digital or analog (leave aside extreme cases like direct to disc). The real difference is in home replay.
Digital studios (all studios nowadays?) generally use excellent clocks and most listeners (in my opinion, all listeners) would not be able to tell the difference between the two types of masters in the studio - if anyone ever made that experiment.
Digital signal reconstruction is difficult to time and without a high accuracy clock (even a good TCXO wont cut it) in the digital stream prior to conversion in home systems, analog is going to win most times.
The fact that digital mastering makes sense in so many other ways is neither here nor there. Give psychoacoustics its credit - it was only in its implementation in the home digital process over the last 40 years where things went wrong, i.e. market considerations and the belief that all consumers are idiots.
But now very good quality digital clocks for home systems are cheap. How long before this permeates into the audiophile collective unconscious?
Best wishes
Aubrey