Jeff Evans
That is one of the things about CD's that is great. Any pressing is the same quality everywhere. I have also been through the process of producing albums for clients too back in the day and sending off the two track master and getting test pressings back and then comparing them to the two track master. Often they were much worse and you had to keep giving the mastering engineers instructions and getting new test pressings back until it sounded better etc.. None of that now either with CD's. Just send off the master and it comes back perfect every time.

But interestingly there are sometimes a number of different masterings - and I'm talking outside of the heavily promoted "remastered" reissues designed to get people to buy the same CD again.
 
Check out all the different versions of Pink Floyd CD's released in the US:
 
http://pinkfloydarchives.com/DUSCDPF.htm
 

drewfx1
 
But interestingly there are sometimes a number of different masterings - and I'm talking outside of the heavily promoted "remastered" reissues designed to get people to buy the same CD again.
 
Check out all the different versions of Pink Floyd CD's released in the US:
 
http://pinkfloydarchives.com/DUSCDPF.htm
 

All the big bands had this problem. The Beatles as well as the Rolling Stones ... and each pressing was always different in some way, however minimal it might be.
 
The MP3 thing has helped some, however, if the copy is made of a 3rd or 4th generation something, you are back to the same story.
 
I don't know of any bands that were not affected by this, until the days of digital releases by the bands themselves when they can have better, and more, control over their own work.

Interesting. I could go on and on about different things in the debate for analog or digital but it's hard to describe some things so I submit for your consideration 2 examples:
 
This is specifically for the recordings of The Pretenders - "Middle of The Road"

 
At around 2:28 of the song she counts the measures starting at 1 and goes to 8. On very good equipment, at the around the year of the recording, you could hear her count to 8 (yes she does count to 8).
 
With the vinyl in ~good condition, medium turntable (~$300), medium stylus and shell (~$100) and a
JVC home theater system, I can get almost to 7. (I know it's there and it seems like I can hear it but may be imagining it).
 
The same amp and speakers wit the CD, a variety of wavs, mp3s and the best I can get is 3.
 
My point being that even with the same system, a mediocre vinyl medium shows that something is missing from the digital copies. Perhaps the vinyl was pressed with a hotter recording. shrugs
 
I was one of the first to jump on digital when the first cd players were sold. I love the portability and hardiness (ie CD's) of the digital mediums. I know the tech behind digital and analog and can't explain it but I know something is not there in the digital formats.

Having an electronics background, I do know the tech behind digital and analog. When I test/experiment with identical conditions with the only variable being the source - an album or an mp3, I know what my ears are telling me.
 
However, say what you think you know.

DrLumen
Having an electronics background, I do know the tech behind digital and analog. When I test/experiment with identical conditions with the only variable being the source - an album or an mp3, I know what my ears are telling me.
 
However, say what you think you know.

 
In my case, I don't have to say what I think I know. My knowledge is based on objective evidence that is consistently reproducible - with consistent results from a variety of different types of objective tests and measurements - and it holds up under scrutiny.
 
If you think you can hear things in a format (vinyl) with not just higher noise levels, but many times higher noise levels than CD, it's almost certainly because you made a mistake in testing or tested two different things. 
 
You said yourself you couldn't explain it (and claim to be technically knowledgeable), and your results don't match what theory predicts, what quantitative measurements tells, and they aren't consistent with the results of careful double blind objective tests done by others.
 
We don't throw out all of that other stuff because you make a claim where you didn't even explain how you know the vinyl and CD came from the same source and didn't explain the test conditions in detail. 
 
And the faith you have in your ears is perhaps a sign that you aren't aware of just how unreliable they are. I know I don't trust mine at all in any kind of casual testing.

Moshkito
 And even then, I have not seen a feature in Ableton or Sonar to do so. Only to increase or decrease the BPM.
 

WAV files have a header at the front of the file that tells what sample rate it is.
 
If you do a Sample Rate Conversion to a slightly higher rate but leave the file header to say the sample rate is 44.1kHz, it will play back too slow and you will get a similar effect to a turntable playing back a little slower. There are a number of audio processing programs that will let you do an SRC to an arbitrary rate and also manipulate the sample rate information in the file header.
 
There are also actually time stretching routines in Sonar that I think could do this, but a good SRC will provide unmatched quality. I'm not really sure how good Sonar's time/pitch stuff is at it's highest quality levels (haven't looked into it), but you could certainly play with it.

Yes, vinyl can indeed sound different, but this does not automatically indicate a limitation of the digital format. The digital didn't lose any information itself if a mastering engineer took that information out - the digital was just given less information to work with.
 
 
The brief summary (for anyone who cares):
 
For non-lossy-compressed digital, the most obvious loss of information is high frequencies that need to be filtered out and anything else that gets thrown out in the process. It is indeed a limitation of digital formats that frequencies >= half the sampling rate need to be filtered out.
 
The other way you can lose information is if you don't dither and reduce bit depth then you truncate some low level information that might otherwise be audible in the noise.
 
After that we are talking about stuff below the noise floor or otherwise masked by noise, distortion, aliasing or any other artifacts. 
 
Given the noise floors of vinyl vs. CD quality digital, the most likely reasons something would be audible on vinyl but not on the digital side is that something happened to make the audio different beforehand. It could have been a hotter recording (as you suggested), EQ, compression, a different mix or any number of other things done for any number of reasons. I suppose it might be possible that various vinyl distortions could make something more audible, but that's hardly a limitation of digital. 
 
 
 
For lossy compression, psychoacoustics are used to attempt to throw away stuff that the ear is going to throw away itself before it even gets to the auditory nerve, much less the brain. To the extent that the encoder is successful at this, even though it's "lossy" it can indeed be transparent to humans. Modern encoders at higher bit rates are quite successful at this, as anyone who has done a proper ABX test knows. There are some signals that are more difficult to compress transparently and there are some people who are quite good at hearing artifacts, but the problems with lossy compression are often vastly overstated, especially at higher bit rates and especially with people who don't understand that their own ears are "lossy". The easiest way to evaluate for one's self how well this does (or doesn't) work is to just do some ABX tests and see.

There's a lot of words in this thread. Who won?

jamesg1213
There's a lot of words in this thread. Who won?

I come from the school where there are no losers until money changes hand.

Moshkito
when no one (even today!!!!) has a turn table and have no idea how good some of these things can sound!
 

I have one and on very rare occasions I put on an LP and it can sound surprisingly good.
 
Just not as good as CD, due to the inherent limitations of the format that no amount of technology (or money) can overcome. 

Mmm... Becan!

The other big difference:  Albums degrade with multiple plays, CD's don't.  When I was a DJ from '80 thru '83 we would always have to look across the top of an album to see if it was still black.  If it was gray, then that meant the grooves had been worn out and the album got tossed and replaced.
 
I went through multiple albums of certain favorites like Boston's first two albums, AC/DC's Back In Black, etc.

Listened to some vinyl today while on the treadmill. Sounds pretty good and the treadmill noise masks pretty much all the vinyl noise! I might make a habit of it as I realized how much music I only have on LP (or cassettes, but...) and I don't really want to walk for the entire duration of a 60 or 70 minute CD. 
 
Today it was side 1 of Mahavishnu Orchestra - Between Nothingness & Eternity Live
 

 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Nothingness_%26_Eternity
 
 
 

Hi,
 
Haven't played anything on my turntable in a couple of months ... now you got me going!
 
Still don't know what I want to hear!
 
Let's try this:
 
Popol Vuh - In the Pharaoh's Garden (recorded in the famous quad version the Germans had in those days)
 
Robert Schroeder - Floating Music (his 1st on Klaus Schulze's label IC ... and the album can be played in 33RPM AND 45RPM. Sounds heavy and teutonic crazy at 33RPM and somewhat p[op song'y at 45RPM. Still magnificent ... if you have never heard this! (Craig ... you got to hear this!)
 
Can't do that on a CD!!!!!