Digitally remastered vinyl?

There are people who claim that certain early 80's digital recorders (Soundstream & 3M) were superior to any current 16/44.1 technology. Unfortunately these systems never attained wide use. Ry Cooder's "Bop 'Til You Drop" and Donald Fagen's "Nightfly" are excellent sounding pop recordings made with these machines.

The problem with the majority of early 80's digital recordings is that few people understood the importance of jitter and dither. When attention is not paid to these issues a recording can become brittle and generally unpleasant sounding.

One of the reasons they dropped the "DDD" "AAD" and "ADD" labels is that modern record production is rarely so simple in its use of technology. In a modern pop/rock recording the original base tracks of a song may start out as a digital recording within a computer running Cubase or some other sequencer/recording program. These tracks may later become synched to a 24 channel, 2" analog tape recorder and additional music tracks added. Everything could then be ported over to ProTools, a digital workstation, for editing and mixing. Rather than keeping it digital through the final mastering stage, alot of producers/musicians like the sound of their final mixes when they are transfered to 1/2" analog tape. Whether or not the submitted music is in a digital or analog format, most of the better mastering houses still use analog signal processors before downloading the material into a digital workstation (SADiE or Sonic Solutions) for final prep to redbook CD format. What's interesting is that great sounding records can actually result from such a serpentine recording process, but to Lugnut's earlier point, it's all about the skill of the engineers and the level of care they take.