Has anyone been able to define well or measure differences between vinyl and digital?

A thought I've been having lately is how noise changes our perception. I think some noise in the recording and perhaps even distortion gives the mind a place to go, to fill in what isn't actually there. When it's taken away there's no where for that to happen. Consider the dreaded soap opera effect with motion pictures. This happens when the frame rate is too high. The theatrical drama can be ruined even though it is technically superior. This may also be the case with too much resolution. I don't agree that digital messes up micro details or micro dynamics or somehow fails to reproduces some fine nuance of what we can hear. I suspect it's just the opposite, and the precision and lack of noise makes more bare and plain the limitations of using microphones to record music and then speakers, typically no more than two, to play it back. 

Another interesting thing with LP is crosstalk between the stereo channels, which is not just any old crosstalk but reversed in phase. Who knows what that does to our hearing perception but I've been playing with out of phase signals mixed with in phase from opposite channels and it can produce an amazing amount of spaciousness. Records do a little of this because of how the needle moves to create stereo. Digital doesn't do it at all. There's also pre-echo with LP. You can hear the neighboring groove before it's played, and I assume the trailing groove as well. LP mixes up some strange audio soup, and it's not surprising if people find some magic in that. 

@thespeakerdude

I have found that vinyl records sounded better than the same album on CD. My girlfriend whole heartedly agreed. I wondered why the CDs sounded relatively crispy and lacking in richness and fullness. I suspected frequency response, but this is hard to test on an LP playback chain. How do you test it? Is there a record with a sweep tone on it that can be used as a reference point? I couldn’t find one so I resorted to comparing the spectral content of the same song played through my CD player or through the LP chain. What I found was a nice gradual roll off of the highs on the LP compared to the CD. This was consistent across multiple albums. So using a digital equalizer I replicated that roll off for the CD player and the CDs sounded much better! I tricked my girlfriend with the equalizer. So that’s another interesting point about LP playback. What really is the frequency response? A gradual treble roll off does not necessarily create an impression of a lack of highs. It can sound bigger, fuller, deeper, more spacious. It might even sound more detailed if the overall balance in the listening room comes across better. If someone has experience with calibrating frequency response on cartridges and phono stages I’d like to learn more about that. If it turns out they really are producing flat playback response on most high end systems that would be interesting to know. My system was not high end, just a Sumiko Blue Point on a Project One turntable playing into a Creek integrated amp. Stereophile, I think, had put me on to that setup as a decent budget rig that could beat most digital.

@thespeakerdude

Thanks! So I assume those records have perhaps sweeps and pink noise, white noise, etc, which you could get a line level reading off of the phono stage output to analyze. Anybody here tried that?

I did my testing using a Behringer DEQ2496 and calibrated microphone fixed on a tripod in front of one of the speakers. I didn't do a phase test. It had a real time analyzer on it and I’d just play the music on LP and watch that real time analyzer with it’s peak hold feature. I’d take a picture of it at the end of the song, re-set the peak hold, and then play the same song on the CD and compare the peak hold values at the end. It was crude but I could definitely see a consistent difference with the highs not coming up so much on the LP playback. 

I never tested the Sumiko Oyster cartridge I had before the Blue Point but I’d bet it was even more rolled off. That was a moving magnet cartridge and I had a Carver Pre-amp with the right settings for that.