Am I nuts or what?


I am a dedicated analog listener but have an open mind and am willing to give digital a chance...again and again...so I decide to listen to McCartney's Tug of War. I pull the vinyl off the shelf and give it a good cleaning noticing that I hadn't taken very care of my discs in the 80s. Anyhow, I slap it on the VPI TNT and start listening...not bad, but not great either due to the occasional tick - I notice on the cover that the album was digitally mixed. Hmmm - I go and pull the CD off the shelf - late 80s purchase when I got sucked into replacing my vinyl collection - made in Japan...I slid it into my ARC CD player and was shocked at the noise that came out of my speakers...it was so thin sounding that I thought that something must be wrong with my CD set-up - metallic, tinny crud...I was thankful to have even a mediocre copy in vinyl.
I just can't believe how an album that was digitally mixed could sound so bloody awful on CD. I do have some CD's that sound great but the vast majority can't even come close to the original vinyl. Sorry for the rant, but it's been awhile since I've listened to a CD.
ntscdan
almost all vinyls after 80's were digitally mixed and i see nothing wrong in sound on most of them. WATT, ECM labels made out every recording excellent.
although i can't just through digital despite not paying too much attention on upgrading my digital combo connected with simple and cheapo Canare digital cable. whatever i cannot acquire on LP i go for cd especially for the new modern jazz recordings Scofield, Stern, etc...
some of Frank Zappa recordings never were released on vinyl.
You're probably not nuts. (Well, you're an audiophile, so you probably ARE nuts, but that's not what's relevant here.) There are two possible explanations for what's going on here. One, as others have said, is bad mastering. There's no guarantee that the LP and CD used the same digital master. Two is that there are things about vinyl that make it sound good. Lots of people think LPs sound "richer" and CDs "thinner." (There's a lot of debate in certain circles about just why that is.) Looks like you've had a very common experience.
Hey ntscdan...I just listened to that same LP a few months back. I didn't compare it to the CD, but I did notice the early digital effect on the recording. It just doesn't sound right in many ways. I've noticed that same thing with other albums from the 80s where people went digital a little too early...the technology wasn't mature yet. I really like Todd Rundgren's "Nearly Human" album, but the combination of the early all digital recording and his mixing (he has tinitinitis) makes it unlistenable to me.
The original digital studio masters probably sound very good, possibly even wonderful.

When an original high bit rate digital master is converted directly to analog, the LP format renders the data very well. When that same digital master is mixed so far down to meet the 21 year old Redbook standard, a good bit of the data is lost.

The same principal applies to digital photography. Super high bit digital captures (originals) and super high quality conversions from analog (film) are almost equal at preservation of the original quality.

As an example (photographically), a perfect digital transfer from a single frame of a Hasselblad (medium format camera) requires a scan of about 500 MB. Making a single analog frame occupy much of the data space on a CDR.

If a digital format were offered that preserved 100% of the original digital material, analog fans may view digital as equal to analog.

This probably would require a format of greater capacity than the current CD or even the SACD. Perhaps a dual layer DVD.

Unfortunately there is no incentive for record companies to offer that quality when so many of today's listeners are satisfied with MP3.
Comparisons between store purchased vinyl and CD versions of the same album are usually meaningless because there's no way to know if the recording chain for each version was kept constant. Sometimes an artist will have a different mix for each format specifically designed to take into account the pluses and minuses of vinyl versus redbook digital. Other times the same final mix, which can be either digital or analog tape, is used to master both format versions.