The finest technically recorded album. LP or CD

If SACD recommendations are allowed, I'd have to nominate "Live Recordings at Red Rose Music, Vol. I." This is a disc of minimalist recordings (no electronic gimmickry) made in the Red Rose store in New York City of unamplified instruments in pure DSD (Direct Stream Digital--the native SACD format).

This recording is head and shoulders above any other "little shiny disc" I've ever heard: the quality of the sound is in a completely different league, and the difference is obvious from the very first note!

One caveat: while the audio itself is mind-boggling, it is essentially an "audiophile" recording (one you might not purchase for the music itself, although the music is mostly pretty good). But if you’ve been dubious about the merits of SACD--and who wouldn’t be, considering the vast majority of the PCM dreck that’s been released so far--you MUST check out this disc!!

Don't mean to sidetrack the thread, but I have to comment on Viridian's observation about live broadcasts:

Technically, as close as you can get to live with the exception of live FM broadcasts which are not subject to the violence done to the music by any storage media at all.

I used to think the same thing, but have had to revise this idea after talking to a broadcast engineer at our local public radio station. While live broadcasts are certainly not subject to degradation by any storage and retrieval scheme (analog or digital), I was surprised to learn that at least in the case of remote broadcasts, the audio feed is relayed to the studio via high-quality ISDN [Integrated Services Digital Network] telephone lines. And even if the broadcast were to originate right in the studio, in most cases the signal is then relayed to the transmitter via ISDN.

I am not a broadcast engineer, so would welcome comments from anyone more familiar with these matters, but it seems to me that even though a live broadcast is able to evade the whole storage/retrieval bugaboo, what we are likely listening to these days (maybe not in days of yore) is audio that has been digitized and reconverted to analog at least once!