Mike,
What's your take on "perfectly" digitized vinyl? From your perspective, how close is it to real vinyl? To digital?
For context, I have about 10TB of excellently captured digitized vinyl by someone who is a pro. However, I prefer CDs through my MBL and Esoteric reference transports to any streaming. But if I am streaming, I prefer digitized vinyl to any digital. And I do enjoy hearing my friends' vinyl rigs 10-12 times a year; definitely better than their digital in most cases.
Thanks in advance
not simple to answer.
i have 800-900 full Lp albums ripped to 2xdsd, and a few to quad dsd. they were done 6-8 years ago by a friend with the same tt' and cartridge and phono i used at that time, and almost 100% were pressings i owned, mostly i also owned the digital too. not sure how many TB that is but it's plenty.
i would rank these 2xdsd rips as better than the typical rip to 16/44, many times much better. i have played them quite a bit. OTOH if a good quality tape transfer of the recording to digital exists, at this point, most times the native pcm rip from tape is better. it does make a difference if the native rip was at 88/24 or 192/24, if it's only a 16/44 file i might prefer the 2xdsd rip. native matters.
when i say 'at this point' part of that is, that when those 2xdsd rips were done, the Playback Designs MPS-5 was my digital player. it upsampled everything to dsd. my friend had that same digital player too. so those rips had advantages as at that point pcm was less optimized than now.
those 2xdsd rips now i would describe as inconsistent. some are still really good, and resemble the vinyl lesser by degrees; missing the suspension of disbelief factor mostly. but many are not close to my vinyl now, as my vinyl has greatly advanced.
if we want to rank those 2xdsd rips against all digital, it's mixed. it depends on the quality of the recording and mastering.
with Roon you mostly get the option to hear 'versions' of recordings. with includes the choice of the 2xdsd rip, so often can listen to those in comparison to the Tidal versions including MQA and all the Quboz versions 16/44 and higher rez, and my own file choices. maybe 33% of the time the 2xdsd rip is my favorite for one reason or another with the Wadax, or the MSB prior. sometimes the vinyl rip is a touch softened and i prefer the more linear tape rip, or an original digital recording. digital just does not need fixing any more.
as far as streaming verses files for compares, with the MSB/Extreme the streaming was a step behind my files, with the Wadax Combo there is very little difference with the same resolution. not enough to effect how the recording compares to the rip.
as these 800-900 2xdsd rips were all great vinyl pressings to justify the effort to rip them, i've not had a case where i prefer the digital to the vinyl for these. none are close any more, not that they were ever that close.