A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

Question - How did Sony management in the early 80s judge or determine who can hear what? Did they have a bevy of audiophiles on staff? I suspect it’s more likely the Redbook CD committee decided on 16/44 based on technical considerations and constraints only.

stevecham

The sampling rate of lacquer/metal/vinyl is the number of polymer molecules flying past the stylus at the outer edge, ~15 ips, to ~ 8 ips at the inner part of the groove. That number is astronomical and blows away any conceivable, let alone practical, digital sampling rates.

For that to be true, each molecule would have to be capable of registering either a 1 or a zero. Were that the case, we’d be loading computer software such as Windows and MS Office from LP - there’d be no need for a CD-ROM. We wouldn't need the DVD, either - we could put entire movies on a single LP side. But of course that isn’t even remotely true. CD can store substantially more data than any LP.

teo_audio

It is said that to equal an LP, a digital system would have to sample at minimum of 7 million samples a second, and with ~zero jitter~ in that spec to be met.

Other than you, who has made this claim? You're suggesting that an LP can hold more data than a CD. That simply isn't even remotely true.