I tend to agree with Mark Baker of Origin Live and his three pillars of sound quality: dynamics, tonality, and clarity. Even these three however can be broken down extensively. Dynamics for example can refer to the greatest range soft to loud, or the speed and magnitude of transient attacks, and so on. Tonality can mean anything from frequency response to timbre to the way some things can sound woody, or open, or closed in. Even clarity can mean many things. Most would probably say a simple sine wave has a lot more clarity than a complex chord.
So it is easy for people to hear things differently. There certainly are people who hear primarily tone. They talk and talk about neutrality, frequency response, that kind of thing, with nary a comment having to do with subtle microdynamics or inner detail.
Most of what distinguishes digital is its bland uniformity. This is the flip side of saying it has more consistency of character. So does McDonald’s.
Vinyl on the other hand, analog in general, somehow captures much more of the original event than digital ever has, or probably ever will. How else explain what we all know, that records pressed 75 years ago sound so unbelievably good? When a bunch of audiophiles were here last year and I played them a whole side of Sinatra-Basie a couple said it was the best they ever heard. The other one that got that same comment was Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. When we changed to digital we lost half the room.
True story. They all sat listening to vinyl for a good 90 minutes. Five minutes of CD was more than most of them could take.
You don’t want to hear what happened when we played the same Tracey Chapman track for one woman on CD and then vinyl. At least, not if you were expecting her to prefer the CD.
Don’t expect to change any minds. Like I said, people listen for different attributes. Audiophiles love to justify music appreciation in technical terms. What I have seen, over and over again, digital just ain’t all that.