New take on CD vs Vinyl vs CD

The record and the recording of the record can't be compared to a CD to do anything but compare how different engineers interpreted what should be on each format and perhaps what they had for breakfast that morning or if they fought with their spouse. That and how your turntable is setup. You are comparing Macintosh and Granny Smith applies. Some like one, some like the other, some like both and different ones on different days.

That you liked the CDR20, a pretty ancient beast now, says the CD format is pretty robust. I doubt the CDR20 gets the most possible out of it.

Interesting. I don’t know about digitizing vinyl. I seem to have a problem with getting on board with that. I’m really impressed with how digital has come along me right now I’m focusing on that with my system. With the right equipment red book cd is amazing along with hi rez music files like dsd. I’ve been an advocate of the bluesound node in the past and all the tweaking that you can do with it,  but after upgrading to an Esoteric Network player, wow. I haven’t played vinyl in a while. The future is truly digital, and after looking at my huge vinyl and cd collection, I’m afraid it’s probably streaming. 

And another problem with your A/B comparison...... The Go go's "We got the beat", are you kidding me, that was your test song. Not exactly the high quality recording one might use for this kind of experimentation. The song has too much going on in it and I would think impossible to catch all of the nuances of a great recording. My opinion has nothing to do with the performance, just the recording. If I were running this test, I might grab a vinyle that truly has a great recording quality..... Anything from say Steely Dan for instance. That would be a better baseline to start with. You may as well have done this with Led Zeppelin..... Love the band, hate the recordings.

Zzzz

+1 dinov. I went the same route as you with a Bluesound node and then up the food chain with an R2R DAC and Auralic G2 streamer. Sold my turntable and phono stage for more than what I paid for it and all my vinyl also at top dollar to one person ( only had about 300 albums). Never looked back.

So many posts about what format sounds better. In my experience it is more dependent on the recording than the format. However, being able to access so much music on demand via streaming has, at least for me, put the fun back in music playback. I guess I'm a music lover first, and an audiophile second.