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

Some have stated here that digital sounds 'lifeless'.

The reason for this is obvious and immutable.  It arises because the analogue signal has been chopped up into billions of pieces.  It is chopped up in two dimensions: frequency and time.  Once it has been diced in this way, all the expensive gizmos in the world cannot put it back the way it was.  It will never sound like the original analogue experience.  Of the two dimensions, chopping time is by far the more damaging.  However good your clock the timing will be forever artificial.  it will never again sound like the real thing.

Digital sound could be compared with digital images.  It could be said that with sufficient resolution digital imaging can be of very high quality.  This may be so, but for imaging, the image is not chopped in the time dimension. 

@akgwhiz    I do not agree that a preference for vinyl is caused by noise and distortion being "desirable".  The preference arises not from negative attributes of vinyl being perceived perversely as positive, but from the negative consequences of digitisation that cannot be reversed.

The answer to your point is the forever related issues of clock error and dither.  When CDs started in 1984, these errors were gross and most agree many CDs were unlistenable.  Retrospective engineering of clocks and DACs has improved performance considerably but my fundamental theorem will always remain.  The issue isn't related to the fact we can only hear a limited range of frequencies.  Whatever the medium, they all record and reproduce a limited range of frequencies.  The issue affects what some have acronymed 'pace, rhythm and timing - PRAT. 

@thespeakerdude     My issue is certainly not with HF performance.  Like yours, my ears now go nowhere near 20kHz now anyway.  My first post referenced those comments that digital sound is 'lifeless' compared with vinyl.  I also find this with a lot of CDs but certainly not all.  The absolute worst one I heard was actually by Chesky (a symphony, can't remember which, I haven't looked at it for 25 years) that I found unlistenable, notwithstanding it was supposed to be better.

So what is the cause of this perceived lifelessness?  Certainly uprated digital generally sounds much better, no argument.  I have a few SACDs.  Pretty well all are better than the best CDs; and some of are excellent and sound to me better than the vinyl equivalents.  In my view this doesn't deny my proposition; breaking the performance down into smaller pieces reduces the translation error - this is proved by elementary calculus.