Some members posting in this thread seem to believe as digital “measures” better than analogue, it must be better and every audiophile should find digital better. I think they are missing a couple of points.
First, are we measuring the right things, and all of the right things, that affects our emotional response and enjoyment to music reproduced in a system? When CD was introduced, engineers already told us it was “Perfect Sound Forever”, with much lower distortion and wider dynamic range than LP etc. See what happened since than? New type of digital distortion called “jitter” was discovered, which was never measured, or at least not shown in products’ specifications, before. It was certainly new for audiophiles! Now we have DSD, DSD512 etc., and same old story we are still being told it measures better than analogue, so can we be sure no more new types of digital distortions will be discovered in the future?
The second point is there is a personal side to our reactions to distortions, some of us are just more sensitive to a certain kind of distortion than others. Just to share a recent experience, I and my friend visited another audiophile, who had a high-end digital base system with all the room correction functions etc. While the sound was not my cup of tea, I didn’t hear any obvious distortion. However, after listening for a while, I felt the muscles at the back of my neck tensed up, and with passing time, I felt slight physical pain starting from the back of my ears all the way down the neck! What is interesting is that both the audiophile and my friend didn’t share the feeling！
I want to point out that I rarely have this reaction on audio systems, digital or analogue. The last time I had similar reaction, but a lot less severe, was with a first generation CD player.
The point I want to stress is that since my friend and the audiophile didn’t have the same reaction, I have to conclude that I am just more sensitive to the particular type of distortions in that system. To expand from this, I think it is certainly possible that, we who prefer analogue may just be more sensitive to the types of distortions in digital, even though the “measured” distortion maybe lower!
Of course, the opposite can also be true, audiophiles who prefer digital may just be more sensitive to distortions in analogue!