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vinyl versus digital redux

Has anyone compared the sound of vinyl with the sound of digital converted from a vinyl intermediary ?

I am referring to 'rips' of vinyl made with high end, high quality vinyl playback systems, with
conversion to high resolution digital.
I find it nearly impossible to distinguish the two results.
The digital rip of a vinyl record sounds identical...or very nearly so...to direct playback of the vinyl.

If one has 'experienced' the foregoing, one might question why digital made without the intermediary of vinyl sounds so different from vinyl.   A detective story ?

We are talking about vinyl made by ADC (analog to digital conversion) of an amplified microphone signal and re-conversion to analog for output to the record cutting lathe, or from analog tape recording of an amplified microphone signal, and then....as above...via ADCl and back to analog for output to the cutting lathe.

Of course vinyl can be and is 'cut' (pressings made from 'stamper' copies the 'master' cut in lacquer) without digital intermediary.  Such practice is apparently uncommon, and ?? identified as such by the 'label' (production)

Has anyone compared vinyl and high resolution digital (downloads) albums offered by the same 'label' of the same performance ?  Granted, digital versus vinyl difference should diminish with higher digital resolution.   Sound waves are sine waves....air waves do not 'travel' in digital bits.    A digital signal cannot be more than an approximation of a sine wave, but a closer approximation as potential digital resolution (equating to bit depth times sampling frequency) increases.

If vinyl and digital well made from vinyl intermediary sound almost identical, and If vinyl and digital not made via vinyl intermediary sound quite different, what is the source of this difference ? 

Could it reside....I'll skip the sound processing stages (including RIAA equalization)...in the electro-mechanical process imparting the signal to the vinyl groove ?

Is there analogy with speaker cone material and the need for a degree of self-damping ?
Were self-damping not to some extent desirable, would not all speaker cones, from tweeter to sub-woofer, be made of materials where stiffness to weight ratio was of sole importance ?

Thanks for any comments.
seventies

Showing 2 responses by bluemoodriver

bluemoodriver
193 posts
 
Well this seems to make sense, but am I oversimplifying?

When the artist’s work is prepared for distribution, a vinyl pressing is made and digital streaming files are prepared. The digital streaming files will be identical to the digital mix prepared for distribution. 
The vinyl pressing will be as close as a skilled cutter of a spiral groove can get to it. Close, but never a duplicate. 
Some listeners really like the changes to the original sound that cutting the spiral groove introduces. So much so, that if they want to listen away from their turntable they would rather have a digital copy of the sound the spiral groove makes than the digital duplicate of the original mix.  
And the quality of that copy of the spiral groove can be so good as to be indistinguishable - showing that the ear can not distinguish a digital copy of an analogue sound. 
Is that right?

bluemoodriver
193 posts
 
Anyone got an estimate of the proportion of all masters which have yet to be captured in red book digital quality or higher? I’m guessing, now that Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, and Spotify are competing on total digital library size, the proportion is small.
If the proportion of non-digitised masters is small, then we can conclude either i) not enough people want to listen to the remaining non-digitised tapes so who cares really, or ii) there should be a crowd-funder effort to complete the capture to achieve the complete permanent preservation of all The artefacts of that extraordinary period of human artistic achievement.
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