Thats quite a claim, but entirely anecdotal. Can you support that objectively? I've never measured nor heard vinyl that sounded like the source, if only due to variations in playback. In a very real sense, cartridge/needle/groove offer a couple orders of magnitude MORE variation than any DACs I use, and the sound of a disc varies from table to table, much like the voice of a singer varies with different mics. On the other hand, I've witnessed people mistake high res playbacks for performance.
It's a good story, and I don't doubt your experience. Exceptional reproduction is possible, and many of the distortions introduced by the process are inaudible in real-world settings. Still we can measure DACs against cartridges, and the variation from linearity from best-to-worst consumer DAC is much less than the variation in cartridges in the heydey of vinyl (ironically for many of the same reasons).
Doug Sax, in a panel, once posited that vinyl sounds better because like speakers it's a mechanical medium, where a real object moves back and forth, just like cones of speakers. His term is that vinyl "predigests" music for contemporary speakers. This is a reasonable hypothesis, and certainly explains what you describe: Like a needle in a groove, the mics on the far side of the console, move sympathetically with sound, and both mechanisms roughly mimic the motion the speaker must make to create sound, on a different scale.
Low resolution digital, like CD, doesn't "stairstep" as audiophiles often claim, but the waveform isn't constrained by physics and the laws of motion, but rather the laws of information. This problem is exacerbated by dsp: we generate increasingly "abstract" waveforms, further disconnected from reality. Higher resolution digital can perform much better at the microphone, accurately tracking real motion, but again, mixing and dsp are a step removed from physical reality. This isn't inherently "bad" or "wrong", but it's not hard to see how this abstraction could negatively impact translation, getting worse with each successive process, even at high resolutions.
In practical terms, it suggests digital can be much better sounding, wrt sound coming out of speakers, if DACs contained some dsp to model the physical world: limiting slew rates, tolerating offsets, and rolling off high and low response in a more natural (non-linear and bumpy) way, which implies high resolution, possibly as much as 192K. Until we have speakers that better mimic the real world, the music might benefit from some "predigestion" (the real issue suggested is addressed in the speakers, not a digital vs vinyl matter) in the digital domain. Still there are really a couple problems here, and over the next century both must be addressed.
In the meantime, this is one of the best explanations I've read for the differences between what you've heard/observed and I've measured. I trust my ears and measurements, you trust yours. Niether of us appears to be insane, and our conversation suggests mutual concern over a real issue. Rather than beat on each other, we might advance our field by looking at this objectively, and consider this a problem to be worked out. I seriously doubt there will ever be a return to vinyl or analog, so if we care about the music we're making we need to get this digital thing "right".
take care,
-d-
