OK, yes, I'm posing a controversial question, but honestly and with the best of intentions. I recognize that there's no quantification of either medium that will be fair to both formats. That at some point you have to call in a cognitive expert to weigh in on what the ear is capable of hearing and what can be perceived. To even pose such a question is like bringing up politics or religion. Vinyl junkies swear there is a difference: It's the only medium that contains actual music.
Adherents of digital encoding of audio point out all the many benefits and practicalities and the emergence of better and better technologies. Plus, most new vinyl contains music that was processed digitally at some point anyway, so they might say that fans of vinyl are deluding themselves.
But I'd like to put such things aside and ask if there has ever been a study to quantify what is required to reproduce audio digitally what is possible with analog. For that matter, how do either compare to actually being there? Can digital one day exceed vinyl or has it already? What's the bitrate of the human ear?
Adherents of digital encoding of audio point out all the many benefits and practicalities and the emergence of better and better technologies. Plus, most new vinyl contains music that was processed digitally at some point anyway, so they might say that fans of vinyl are deluding themselves.
But I'd like to put such things aside and ask if there has ever been a study to quantify what is required to reproduce audio digitally what is possible with analog. For that matter, how do either compare to actually being there? Can digital one day exceed vinyl or has it already? What's the bitrate of the human ear?