When and how did you, if at all, realize vinyl is better?

^ Yes. I record vinyl albums to c-cassettes and listen them in my car. I also enjoy them as the second best music media at home. I owe original c-cassettes from early 70´s those not yet Dolby NRS and they outperform CD, particularly in the dynamics. I must point out that I don´t use noise reduction in recording `cos it compress dynamics.

I left my reasonably good, intro to hifi system with a friend when I left the country in 2005. I lived abroad until 2009, and good sound had to go on hold. When I got back to the states, and found a place to live, I picked up my gear from my friend. At that point, I had no more CDs, I had sold them to a second hand shop. All of my music was ripped to low grade MP3. My god what a horrible mistake that was.  I plugged an iPod and a laptop into my preamp and being as these were the days before tidal HIFI, pure garbage came out in the form of my low grade highly compressed ripped CD collection.  My system was a reasonably good one for a starter kit. I had about 4 grand in an amp, preamp, and a pair of monitors.  Nothing to win awards, but it was a nice enough setup.  Especially nice enough to show me how bad my music collection sounded!

i started back into a hobby that I only had an intro to before I moved abroad. I bought a basic rega table, a dynavector 10x5, and basic NAD phono pre.  I bought 10 albums online and got my groove on. 

Holy shit! Pardon my French, but holy shit!!  Now that's one huge difference.  A fully unfair comparison to be sure, but that is how it played out.

fast forward 8 years, and my system is far more refined and I have invested more than 10 times of what I had in my early set up.  My mother-in-law, a keen audiophile herself, and I were doing an audio nerd A-B test between my digital front end and my analog. The test was with a couple of high res tracks that I have in digital as well as on vinyl.

my vinyl rig is a touch more expensive than my digital, but they are fairly well matched for the quality of sound they should provide.  PS audio PWD mk II & Bridge mk II with Roon vs Michell Tecnodec, Lyra Delos, and Whest PS.30r.

So when my mother-in-law and I were in our audio nerd mode, A-B-ing the digital vs analog, there was really not much of a comparison. The high res digital on the PS Audio gear sounds really outstanding, but the same tracks on the turntable just sound better. Plain as day. More feeling, more presence, just there.

These days I listen to digital when I am entertaining my infant son and don't have a lot of free time to play records, or when I am doing things in the house. But when it's time to really enjoy music on the hifi, I go for vinyl.