How much do you need to spend to get digital to rival analog?

Gas car?  Electric car?

Unless the listeners ears are between 17 and 25 in biological age every nuance of difference even in CNO systems is impossible to convey.  The actual population discussing this will talk about jitter or filter harshness or wow and flutter or dynamic range etc. and theres too many structural issues to resolve attempting to normalize two very different forms of source media.  Whatever yiur setup is, if you like how one sounds you will become accustomed to the other but circle back to your original preferences.  Im not familiar with anyone devoting close to equal time with analog and digital.  For me, analog is the special occasion champagne while digital is the daily driver...the mixed analogy is intentional.

@bdp24 

It all comes back to the recording, and the disc. Ya know, there ARE plenty of bad sounding LP’s. Besides, if an album is available on CD only, what are ya gonna do, deprive yourself of the music just because you think analog sounds better than digital? Are we sound lovers first, or music lovers?

Someone obsessive enough could transfer the music to RtR or vinyl. 

No offense mikelavigne,

But that article and then things claimed in it at times sounds like the technically questionable, at times arguably wrong, and certainly not universally proven or accepted claims made about MQA. Actually it gave me a total MQA deja-vu, and let’s be honest, there is certainly no agreement, between audiophiles whether MQA is better than simple 24/96 or 24/192, but based on the claims, it should be.


There is one example they use that gave me pause. They claim to hear 15-20db into the noise floor of an analog tape. Then they "pishaw" dithering claiming it is just averaging. If it averaging in the same sense as being able to hear 15-20db into the noise floor is averaging.  (some of the claims they made w.r.t. sound localization w.r.t. waveform distortion are not accurate and supported by current research)


But that was 1995, and much of the problems they identified were from 1986 when they started, and that was really the infancy of digital recording.



Serious question for everyone. How do you reconcile claiming that vinyl is technically better ... not euphonically better, but technically better, when the vast majority of recordings made in the last 2 decades have been recorded on digital? Even where the original is analog, many remasters have been remastered via digitization? At some level, Vinyl is just another "DAC" for many records.