Don't get me wrong, I'm not against vinyl records.  But I do have a realistic idea of the limitations of this technology.  I was very skeptical about the prospects for digital audio until I studied electrical engineering, and learned how to evaluate those things for myself.

I come from the supply side of audio and video production, so it's second nature to me that the retail product cannot be any better than the production process.  Case-in-point most "Yes" albums, which came from multitrack masters that were recorded far into distortion.  There's no way to fix them.  The vinyl records sounded pretty good, and the CD releases sound pretty rotten only because the frequency response limitations of vinyl helps take the edge off the distortion.

Back in the days when vinyl or cheap, mass-produced tapes were the only retail source of all kinds of music, I would have sold my soul to have a collection of 1/2" 30 ips grand masters of all of my favorite albums.  If I could have had that, I would have gladly given up my coveted LP12 for a nice Studer deck.  Today, a properly mastered CD (or AES/EBU standard 24/128 DVD tracks) is pretty darn close to that.

IME it's the first generation of CDs that were poorly mastered.  I've bought newer versions if and when they come out, and have found that remasters keep on sounding better and better as technology progresses.  Of course, the quality of the final product directly reflects the skill of the artist(s).  Yes, almost all of the newer artists sound like trash, but that's only because they aren't very good artists in the first place.  Back in the golden age of audio recording (circa '70s), sonic excellence was a must in most cases.  Today it's more like a needle in a haystack.

I never was a big fan of SACD.  1-bit sampling is just fine, but since it's incompatible with the rest of the production process, and mainly because it thwarts the free use of the music, I don't care for it.  Same thing regarding DVD-A, because it uses crippleware.  Give me the pure music that I paid for, and let me use it as I please.  Screw the RIAA and their paranoid fantasies about piracy.  Real music pirates don't care if they're getting a poorly-encoded 64 kbps MP3 file.

There, I feel better now.

Vinyl is very nice in the here and now also. I also have a large CD collection and I enjoy listening to both CD and vinyl. There are some CD's that sound better than the CD counterpart but overall the vinyl still sounds better for a variety of reasons. It's a real shame that SACD and DVD-A didn't catch on because those at least truly had the ability to be better in every way. But unfortunately much new stuff is poorly mastered with egregious amounts of compression and layered mixing and editing with no regard to sound stage and phase coherency. 

Servo wrote: 

As the Vinyl Only Spin List thread is starting to get cluttered up I am starting this tread to continue that "debate" as that is supposed to be a spin list thread. If you want to enter in the Vinyl vs CD debate please continue it here. Thanks

I  moved all the main Vinyl vs CD posts to this thread