Worth pursuing analog sound from digital?

geoffkait wrote " Sorry, not buyin’ it. Digital is a pale facsimile of what it should be. I don’t even have to compare it to analog. Unless you’re extremely motivated and pugnacious you simply can’t extract all of the data on the CD. No way, Jose! And if you don’t do anything at all the best you can expect is about 50% of what’s actually on the CD. And that’s if you’re lucky. Heck, the humble cassette on a Sony Walkman has more life, sweetness and air than a CD ever thought of having. So give me a break! Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “but my CDs sound fabulous!”

Something is wrong with geoffkait.  My professional digital recordings and that of my friends rival R2R.  Prerecorded cassettes sound like dung compared to my beautifully remastered CDs.  I love LPs and I love CDs.  As a part-time recording engineer, I have experience with 40 years of recording equipment.  1000s of my CDs (mostly classical, jazz and early pop) are fantastic sounding and musically involving.  The mastering engineers took great care in making the CDs or were lucky that the mastertapes used for the LPs were sufficiently good to do a straight transfer.   

There must be something wrong with geoffkait.  Compressed Rock CDs do sound bad, but so did many of the LPs and cassettes made from bad mastering.

fleschler,

Totally agree with your last sentence. Just listen to some of the Rock/Pop groups of the mid seventies. Compression was in (over) abundance back then. Many recording companies were too busy trying to make those recordings sound good over your car speaker.

mr_m1 Exactly true.  Engineering for car speakers, not audiophiles (sometimes known as music lovers).

Will digital ever sound like analog.... no.  why.... because it's not analog.

mr_m
fleschler,

Totally agree with your last sentence. Just listen to some of the Rock/Pop groups of the mid seventies. Compression was in (over) abundance back then. Many recording companies were too busy trying to make those recordings sound good over your car speaker.

>>>>>Huh? Compression is a relatively recent phenomenon, the truly egregious compression started in the late 90s and is so bad today that you can see many new recordings and re-issues are “flat-lined” Dynamic Range wise, as shown on the dynamic range database. Also, car speakers have very little to do with why records and CDs are compressed. The mid seventies was actually a period of high dynamic range, as were the eighties and most of the nineties.