DrLumen
... 
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
 
...

 
And one other thing ... that you can only find out if you had recordings of things from the big heavy radio stations in the early FM radio days ... the turntables, were slowed down a teeny bit, and it would be negligible to your ear and mine, but Black Sabbath would sound much heavier ... and better ... than all the LP's and CD's ever sent out to the market. 
 
This is really hard to show and prove, when you are talking 40+ years later, but some of the things in it, were funny, to find and see, when I got me a $400 dollar turntable ... and I went ... you gotta be kidding me? ... nope! Even half a percent, would make it heavier and not much different for our ears!
 
Also, the science that did the maintenance on these turntables ... was not exactly perfect, if the bands that ran it were old and used up, but showed reasonable numbers.
 
CD's, for the most part ... do not seem to have that problem ... and I am not aware of a lot of drudgery that can be done to cheat on it ... other than using a DAW. And even then, I have not seen a feature in Ableton or Sonar to do so. Only to increase or decrease the BPM.
 

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.

I didn't mean to imply that analog is better than digital. I know that any digital recording should be pristine and superior to any analog counterpart.  What I was saying is that at least in this one instance the digital formats lose information. Most all digital formats have some type of compression. MP3 is a lossy format. While I haven't got into code of the other formats, I suspect most of them are lossy as well.
 
As bitflipper and Moshkito was saying, they may have also remastered for CD's and the digital formats. As I said originally, I'm thinking they may have used a hotter recording for the records pressings. This is not some type of imagined metaphysical or psychoacoustical trick of the mind. The difference is easily noticeable. The consumer digital FORMATS also sound a bit tinny to me as well.
 
There was another song from the 80's that has the same type of loss in the digital formats. There was a part where the sound seemed to jump out of the speakers like a ventriloquism effect. It is not the same in the consumer digital formats. I'll have to try to remember the name of the song.
 
To get re-aligned to the subject... I think the idea of HD Vinyl is ridiculous. A less lossy digital format would benefit me more than a new type or marketing for vinyl. While I still have and enjoy my album collection, I really don't want to add to 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.

I hear ya! 
 

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

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

Wow, I didn't even know the Who was competing! 

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.

craigb
I hear ya! 
 

I so want to find one of those little AM radios that used to use a single battery, and then play it again, Sam ... lousy ... horrible ... cheap ... and who cares what the word qualily means, anyway, when no one (even today!!!!) has a turn table and have no idea how good some of these things can sound!
 

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.