CDs Vs LPs

Meaningless question - you can’t generalize.

On some albums vinyl sounds better on some digital, and there can be a half dozen or more remasterings in either, any of which can sound great or crappy, depending on what they started with and what they did with it.

Digital wins on convenience, but if you care about the sound and love the particular material it is tempting to own both formats and see for yourself which is better in a given instance.

I swing both ways - around 0.8 terabyte of digital vs. ~ 4k LPs.

PS - if you complain about pops and tics you are either buying bad used vinyl or lack a proper record cleaning machine.  The fact that you are too lazy doesn't invalidate the format.

Couple of things.

I agree that getting excellent sound from vinyl costs more and takes more time and fiddling to attain. The low level signals from the cartridge are prone to interference and lots of cable dressing and such to eliminate hums can be necessary, and if you have the wrong phono preamps etc. you can have issues that can sometimes only be solved by replacement.

You can attain a good sounding digital rig for a fraction of what the analogue front end costs you, and that added to the convenience factor (I listen to almost all my digital from FLAC files on a server) means that analogue will remain a minority pastime.

When a well recorded album is played on a properly set up analogue rig, it can sound very good indeed and it can be pretty much silent in the background.  I recently played the 1971 Neil Young at Massey Hall LP to a find who works in pro audio and he asked if it was a CD as the background was so quiet.  One shouldn't condemn all vinyl just because your records came from a garage sale and you don't own a decent record cleaning machine.

If the recording chain is less than perfect, it doesn't matter much whether it is analogue or digital - crap is crap and I have listened to quite a few relatively recent remastered digital releases that are inferior to older releases of the same material.

This is all an interesting discussion, but I don't think it leads to any conclusions. Some analogue is excellent and a lot of digital is as well (more today that in the early days, for sure).  You can choose to champion one or the other exclusively, or you can choose my course, which is to enjoy both without any set preconceptions going in.