The key phrase to use is “digital is for people that can’t handle reality”.
Vinyl on a quality analog system DOES sound better than CDs.
I’m partner in a company that sells audiophile equipment. One year we had a show with the top of the line digital system from XXX - $8K CD player, 10K amp, 25K speakers. Next to it we had a vinyl system with a 12K turntable with 5K cartridge and 5K preamp, 8K amp, 25K speakers. Beside those there were a couple of other vinyl systems that were steps down in price.
People flew in to Montana to spend a week of listening.
Hands down the consensus was vinyl was better.
My partner has thousands of records albums - it’s dangerous to let the guy get in the vicinity of a record store. ;-)
For great sound, check the remastered Blue Note tapes done by Steve Hoffman. Bottom line, I like the sound of vinyl better.
When you did the comparison show, did you compensate for the r-l and l-r blending that occurs when vinyl is played when you compared the same albums via the CD player. Some highend cd players allow for a small amount of blend similar to what occurs in a phonograph cartridge. Tweaked highend equipment playing vinyl or otherwise is always going to sound much better than a bestbuy middling brand speakers and mid grade Yamaha receiver....even if I put a turntable and my old realistic outboard RIAA cartridge pre-amp into the system. My flawed equipment has enough resolution though to let me hear if a cd or record has been properly mixed and recorded. I definitely hear the degradation in quality in MP3’s vs their CD counter parts even if mp3’s have been mixed in a high bit rate above 192k. As for records, not having access to a high end turntable, I can only say that at the lower end, the noise and compression inherent in my classical recording drove me away to CD’s. Yes I could hear a difference in the vinyl version of say Andre Previn/LSO “Les Images pour Orchestre”(circa 1980) on EMI Angel vs the CD version when it came out in 1987; but it was a difference in channel separation/ dynamic range and lack of noise(other than a live sense of ambience apparent in both recordings).
I asked about R-L and L-R because in my early rear speaker set ups, I configured them in a series with the positives going to the receiver positives with the two negatives connected to each other and not to the receivers ground. This created a acoustic cross talk cancellation effect that widened the listening field and had the effect of releasing a record’s hidden ambience. I found, especially in earlier CD’s the effect didn’t always work as well as it did in vinyl. The culprit was 25 to 40 db channel separation average on records due to engineering techniques and of course the difference signal artifacts produced by the magnetic cartridges i used. Engineers learned to put a little more ambience signals in their stereo recordings and CD sound improved a lot. Telarc’s minimal miking and mixing in its classical recordings actually translated extremely well from vinyl to digital especially after they got rid of those early nasty dry sounding Soundstream digital recorders from 1978 to 1980 and went to SONY and other brands.