So to start, you should pretty much disregard anyone who thinks CD quality is worse than vinyl. CD quality is 16 bit, 44k samples per second, and despite some audiophile gear now that is 24 bit, 96k samples per second, ABX testing routinely fails to find a difference between them. As such, in terms of music quality and software quality, anything capable of delivering 16 bit, 44k samples should be considered "perfect" (i.e. FLAC/CDs). There is some evidence that in studio conditions, people can hear a difference between high bitrate lossy compression and CD quality, but realistically, even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience.
I feel it's important to explain why <44 kSamp/s sample rates are used. No matter what the digital audio signal should have no information above 20 kHz, but running ADCs far above Nyquist lessens the importance of the analog antialiasing filter. You don't need to worry about expensive caps and how they age if you sample at 192 kHz but filter to 20 kHz. This drives down the noise floor and increases linearity for essentially free.
Please repeat this when people say "there's no reason to use sample rates above 44 kHz". While it's true for source material, it should be properly caveated.
I don’t think that’s giving people enough credit. Sure, if you master for CD to exploit as much dynamic range as possible (as is often done with high end classical music) then CD quality is truly amazing and vinyl can’t even come close.
But, a lot of popular music out there isn’t mastered for that use case (high end ABX testing). On the contrary, there are tons of CDs that are extremely compressed (in the dynamic range sense) so as to sound as loud as possible on the radio [1]. If you compare one of these CDs with an earlier (or even contemporary) vinyl release which has been mastered correctly then of course the vinyl will sound better!
Unfortunately, because we’re dealing with a Wild West of media, new and old, floating around in the marketplace we don’t have the luxury of a perfect ABX comparison, and so people will continue to buy and prefer old formats. It is for that reason that we can’t dismiss them.
"radio" in this case refers more to 'cheap equipment played in a noisy environment'. Back in the 70s ~ 80s that meant car speakers playing over road noise. Now it's cheap ear bud or tinny bluetooth xyz playing over road noise / transit / coffee house ambient noise. It's not how the music gets to you, it's the environment you (most people, that is) hear it in. And on top of that, for most of the audience, it's background noise. So to catch your attention, it gets mastered as 'loud' as possible. Because the next / previous tracks in the playlist are. And so it goes.
Let's add that there is much snake oil in the audiophile obsession. Audiophile formats, equipment, and marketing come and go, but the single most important differentiating factor in audio quality is the equipment and engineering talent at the time of recording.
For example, much of the great early Bluenote jazz was recorded by RVG in the living room of his parents' home in New Jersey. [1]
The first CD's were not that great, being effectively around 14-bit. Better D/A converters and noise-shaping during mastering greatly improved the sound quality.
After that, the loudness wars destroyed it again.
> even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience.
Until it is resampled in the noisy OS mixer and/or lossy compressed again to be sent over Bluetooth. Very few ABX studies consider the effect of such modern "digital signal chains", especially transcoding. It's much better to start with FLAC.
My point is that there are no studies demonstrating the absence of such issues. Anecdotally, my Bluetooth headphones certainly seem to sound better with a FLAC source.
But saying this without mentioning the loudness wars misses the main force behind vinyl's staying power.
This is like making an argument for transistor guitar amps. They're better on paper, but tubes produce a type of distortion that is pleasing to many listeners.
Most of the arguments in vinyl sounding better center on original masters being pressed directly to vinyl “biscuits” without an intermediate step while CDs go through a compression step before they are digitized. These days, that’s rarely true. If original masters are used for too many high volume pressings, they wear out (physically), so the masters are often digitized before they go to vinyl. This sparked some controversy recently regarding a Michael Jackson repress with an ironic twist that nobody could tell the difference or noticed until the mastering engineer slipped up and let the cat out of the bag.
> If original masters are used for too many high volume pressings, they wear out (physically)
E.g. when Dylan's famous 60's electric trilogy first came out on CD, at least two of those albums had to be remixed not for whatever possible artistical and/or money-making reasons [1] that commonly cause remixes to be done these days, but simply because the original master tapes (including the safety copies) had worn out through continuous re-pressings of the original vinyl albums.
[1] Though of course the switch to CD in itself was, while also undeniably a definitive technological upgrade, in some ways also a nice way of making people buy the albums again even if they already owned them in some other storage format.
