How much do you need to spend to get digital to rival analog?

As you suggest Mike Stereophile did this interview back in 1995. I remember listening to the very first Sony CD player at a friend's shop in Akron, Ohio through Krell electronics and Magnapans. It sounded pretty poor. But, cassettes sounded a lot worse and people flocked to them because they were not vinyl and you could play them in your car. CDs were even more convenient and had the potential to outperform cassettes, were not vinyl and they would soon be playable in car audio systems. It was obvious they were going to take off whether or not audiophiles like them. After all we are a very small proportion of the market. Now it is MP3 downloads. It would be three years before Accuphase would make a CD player I could listen to. I suspect it had a fair amount of harmonic distortion added in because it was very tube like.
Still, the best records had better dynamic range. Then came the volume wars (dynamic compression) which IMHO ruined the sound of most popular CDs. Fast forward to High Res digital 96 or 192/24 PCM and recordings that were mastered for this and you have a whole different ball game. Even old analog recordings that were remastered in digital can sound fabulous. In many instances it is only because the original master was poorly engineered. But, better is better. 
The normal background noise on vinyl excluding the rare scratch or loud pop I find not to be objectionable at. It is dithering your brain and in some ways, believe it or not makes the music more realistic. When have you been to a concert with no background noise? Never. People talking coughing, shuffling around, chairs squeaking and the -ss behind you that has to whistle after every song. Vinyl is actually quiet in comparison!
The quietness of digital is actually spooky, sterile. You know you are listening to an artificial recreation because there is no noise. Is this one of the reasons I prefer live recordings? Maybe. 
There is more behind this than the technical aspects and this issue is highly multi-factorial. Gross characterizations do not work and anyone making them has a hidden bias. 

Dear friends: @tzh21y is an anti-digital gentleman and I know not only the way he writes the OP but because in other threads for him exist only analog.

Almost all of us here including M.Lavigne are accustomed to analog because is this medium where we startted to listen MUSIC in our home systems and before that through the radio.

Digital was not the medium for us because just did not exist yet. So, our ears/brain are 100% ( like it or not. ) biased to the analog signature sound in home audio systems. I’m too.

That " signature " is for me the key for the main controversies in between digital and analog where the ones that prefer analog just can’t avoid from their brain that " signature " and this " signature " in on control of what we are listening and if something like digital comes wioth diferent " signature " well does not like us as the analog experiences.

@mikelavigne as me and almost all of us are biased to that kind of " signature " and even if we listen through PCM or DSD top resolution digital sound our reaction is that can’t outperforms analog even if in reality it beats analog but our " brain " is a wall/defender of that analog " signature ".

If things be the other way around and I mean that we were accustomed to digital " signature " and suddenly the new medium been analog our brain will do the same: functioning as a wall/defender of that digital " signature ".

No matters what it’s very dificult to listen analog vs digital with out beeen biased to one or the other medium. Both mediums are different but in some ways are alike too.

I don’t own the M.Lavigne system level ( I wish I own it. ) but I can tell any one thet my system has not only good but excellent resolution with very very low distortion levels of every kind where I can appreciated the truly high quality performance of digital medium that in many ways beats analog. But the issue is not if digital is better or not the real issue is that today we can ejoy digital better than ever.

Digital technology is growing up almost every single day ( computers, cell phones, DAC’s and ADC’s, etc, etc. ) when analog stopped to grow up many years ago and can’t really grow up with better quality because LP overall technology just achieved the limits of that technology, easy as that. In the other side several of the problems of digitakl as jitter, aliasing, discontinuty and the like are already solved and improving about.

Like it or not digital will be improved and seems to me that the the digital end is far away from here and today it’s only starting its mature period so the best is forthcoming and the best we can do is to accept things as in reality are.

At the end we are " here " because we want to listen and have the best MUSIC experiences through our room/system with analog and with digital mediums.

Some one in this thread ask for someone that technically could post why LP is better and no one says: I can do it and no one did it because that’s not posible.

The LP playback process " road " is higly tortuose against digital playback process. Here the biggest differences in between both mediums.

I know: " it’s that my " ears " say analog is superior . """ that’s a normal answer due our accustomed ears/brain " signature ".
Not easy to forget that " signature " and this is the problem because almost always that we are listening to digital instead to compare it against live MUSIC event seated at near field position we are comparing vs the LP " signature " ! ! ! , this for me is each one of us mistake.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.

👍👍👍👍

mijostyn1,294 posts11-06-2019 9:28amThe normal background noise on vinyl excluding the rare scratch or loud pop I find not to be objectionable at. It is dithering your brain and in some ways, believe it or not makes the music more realistic. When have you been to a concert with no background noise? Never. People talking coughing, shuffling around, chairs squeaking and the -ss behind you that has to whistle after every song. Vinyl is actually quiet in comparison!The quietness of digital is actually spooky, sterile. You know you are listening to an artificial recreation because there is no noise. Is this one of the reasons I prefer live recordings? Maybe.
There is more behind this than the technical aspects and this issue is highly multi-factorial. Gross characterizations do not work and anyone making them has a hidden bias.

+1 @rauliruegas 

Digital was not the medium for us because just did not exist yet. So, our ears/brain are 100% ( like it or not. ) biased to the analog signature sound in home audio systems. I’m too.

That " signature " is for me the key for the main controversies in between digital and analog where the ones that prefer analog just can’t avoid from their brain that " signature " and this " signature " in on control of what we are listening and if something like digital comes wioth diferent " signature " well does not like us as the analog experiences.

This mirrors my perspective on the topic.  Thanks, R. - David.