Whew, that was a long reply to my tongue-in-cheek comment meant
in jest!

However, I tend to think you haven't really sat and listened to good
gear fed from a digital source -- eg, a quality CD.

Around 1971- to 76 I was a sales rep for a HiFi equipment importer,
and later ran a specialist HiFi store selling all but the very costliest
gear -- speakers up to around $5 or $6k and amps to a couple of grand -
plus AR etc turntables and Shure V15E etc cartridges. Top gear at that
time.

The weak link was the records that were the main source of music then -
noisy, scratchy, and the better the gear you played them on the more
their short comings became apparent. Of course since that was the
best that we could get, we thought it was pretty good.

But once people heard the same sort of good gear fed from quality
CDs, there was no going back -- like chalk and cheese the new
medium had a brilliance and clarity that previously we had only
heard in live performances.

But, as I thought then, and still think now, horses for courses - if you
prefer your scratchy old records and the his and rumble from the
turntable, then that is fine. If you are happy with what you use, then
that is great, and no one should denigrate your choice.

As an audiophile, amateur recordist, and product reviewer, I find myself
both agreeing and disagreeing -- rather more of the latter.

I can't think of any speaker in the early 70s that sold for $5K a pair (not
even Bozaks or the A7), or even amplifiers that sold for "a couple of
grand". The KLH Model Nine cost $1100 a pair -- and you needed two pair for
adequate bass without adding a woofer. Even QUAD electrostatics were
something like $800 a pair, which was well beyond the reach of most
listeners.

I remember when John Iverson's Electro Research class A power amp came out.
It was something like $1800 -- one of the most expensive power amps on the
market.

The AR turntable was hardly "top gear". It was a cleverly designed product
that sold at a moderate price. And there were plenty of people who didn't
care that much for Shure's V15 pickups.

I had never liked phonograph records (or at least, the way they sounded on
playback equipment I could afford) -- I liked open-reel tape, because it
lacked the distortion and colorations of LPs.

The ultimate issue is whether the reproduction sounds like the original --
not whether it's "musical", or whether it offers "a brilliance and clarity
that previously we had only heard in live performances". It's too easy to be
seduced by those elements of reproduction we like, while ignoring the
others.

I made a lot of live recordings, using both prosumer open-reel and digital.
There was no question that, with that equipment, what I heard on playback
from digital sounded more like what I heard at the microphones than analog
did.

I still strongly prefer digital. But the fact is that LPs can sound very,
very good -- if you play them back on equipment that costs rather more than
what a good CD player costs. Furthermore, LPs don't offer a convenient form
of surround sound -- SACDs do. (I've had surround playback in all my systems
since 1970.)

I invite anyone who doesn't like digital to listen -- in surround -- to the
Rilling performance of Britten's "War Requiem", or MTT's of Mahler's 3rd --
and then tell me what you hear is not a highly convincing reproduction of
live sound. (Ditto for some of Jordi Savall's recordings on AliaVox.) And if
you disagree -- name an LP that comes closer to "live".

I still believe that people who prefer LPs -- which includes young'uns born
after the introduction of the CD -- are simply reacting to the colorations
of a medium that, over a period of 40 years, was -- consciously or
unconsciously -- tweaked to "sound good". As J Gordon Holt said... "Live
sound isn't always 'pretty'."