Article: "Spin Me Round: Why Vinyl is Better Than Digital"

It's written by someone who wants to explain why vinyl sounds better without knowing why it is so, and so pads it out with philosophy and a partially-understood discussion on digital. The superiority of vinyl doesn't have anything to do with the openness of grooves allowed instruments to express themselves and resonate, it's about the superior dynamic performance which contributes to sense of "realness". Why does vinyl mastered from an analog source have this superiority, I don't know. Possibly it's related to time domain resolution which digital is bad at. It's okay to just admit you don't know why exactly vinyl performs better than digital in some ways.

So, digital isn't a perfect representation of a sinewave. A sinewave isn't a perfect representation of a sound wave either but since its the only way to translate audio we'll leave that alone. Digital audio has quantization errors. It's just a fact. Nothing will change that fact. When you take an analog sinewave and collapse it into a binary structure of 1s and 0s, what results is an approximation of the original signal.  We use dithering to smooth over the quantization errors, but they're still errors. Can these tiny, minute steps cause a fundamental degradation of our ability to enjoy the sound? I don't know. Possibly. There is the theory that humans enjoy hi-res music because we're more sensitive to time domain errors than frequency errors, so just because the frequency curve in a 20-20kHz window is reproduced perfectly our brains will nevertheless pick up on these tiny timing errors introduced by digital conversion. It could be this is why vinyl records, loaded with distortion and noise, can still sound better. The fact is NO one knows why hi-res sounds better. NO one knows why vinyl can sound better. The time domain theory is just that -- a theory. It might end up being validated. Is it related to the studies out of Japan using MRI to show listeners exposed to high-frequency music experiencing different brain activity? Is there some kind of non-linearity or unknown high-frequency reception process in our ear-brain system? The listeners are picking something up and doing something with it. I really don't think anyone knows the answers to these questions yet.