Is Digital actually better than Analog?

No. They are just different formats. One is NOT superior to the other and you need both if you have any real interest in music.

Both formats have serious plus' and minus'. Which set you happen to prefer will more likely be the one that fits your personality best.

I happen to have a hard time overlooking all of the warts in vinyl play back (sonic's) and the fussiness involved, and love the simplicity of digital, BUT I have found it more difficult to set up a system that does justice to digital. You just need to tune your system to take advantage of the best that both have to offer, which is not and easy task by any means. IMHO, YMMV, etc etc etc.

ROTFLMAO. What a great sense of humor. Love it!

Interesting observations Nsgarch. I gave up on multichannel attempts at recreating a concert hall at home many years ago. I also agree that there is a lot of information on the disc's to be recovered, much of it is the out of phase information present in the recording venue, which unfortunately is hard to reproduce at home unless you have a perfect acoustic.

In a less than perfect acoustic, there is an old fashion method of getting that 'hall sound' which is cheap and easy to set up (so long as your not too anal about absolutes). I can't recall off hand the name of the designer, but the idea was to place two small speakers in the rear of the room, or preferrably one on each side of the listening seat. Connect the speakers in a loop with one wire connected from the positive post of an amp to the speaker A, then from speaker A to speaker B then back to the hot positive post of the other channel in the amp. You insert somewhere into this loop and attenuator so you can balance the sound with the main system. The side/rear speakers output is kept very low and only produces out of phase info but the room sounds energized and more like a concert hall. Using a seperate amp you can turn it on and off at will, but its possible to wire this into the main amp (I'm to anal to do that).

This type of ambiance extraction existed before Yamaha and some 'other outfit long gone' (I had one of 'long gones' units) produced a unit which did the same, but added digital delay's so you could select hall size and all that other stuff. I think the extraction you are referring to comes from equipment made by suceeding manufacturers. Got to be too fussy for me and actually never sounded as good as the cheapo way. Although from all I've heard maybe ARC got it right in their unit.

Fun stuff if you've got the space, and I think I'd find this much more interesting that the new multi channel recordings and the replay requirements.

FWIW.

Gregm, Just a thought in addition to your comments on 'dynamic range'. I've come to believe that the real importance of getting a system to sound like 'live' instruments, is not so much the difference between minimum SPL and maximum SPL, but whether or not the rise time and, more importantly, the decay time is appropriate to reproduce the sound of a real instrument. (This would apply to the recording process as well as the playback process, can't get blood out of a stone). Just a thought.

Nsgarch, FWIW we are in total agreement. Beyond a certain level of reproduction I for one, and I'm confident there are many others, just don't want to be obsessing about audio minutia...I want to be really listening to and hearing the music. Its fun to fiddle with audio, but its not so fun when it gets in the way of music appreciation.