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No matter how many times I've been told that CD's are better quality recordings, "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys still sounds better on my 1952 all tube, monoural Zenith FM.

Your ears are correct.

An analog is much closer to true sound. With a CD, you get 44 thousand samples per second whose resolution is in 65536 units. And no more. Naturually, this is merely an approximation of a truly full sound.

The digitally-remastered craze was just a marketing gimmick to sell the players. And people liked the smaller and somewhat more durable format of the CD. But the sound was never as good as good quality analog with well-cared for records.

But don't worry. They'll come with the 32-bit DVD-Audio to replace the 16-bit CD-Audio standard. They will claim (finally with some justification) that it is a superior system. And except for a very few people with extremely good ears and high-end equipment, it will be better.

But just think how many people they rooked by selling them the same old albums. First on vinyl, then on cassette, then on CD, now again on DVD-Audio. Same thing goes for video and DVD and the upcoming HDTV DVD discs.

It's all a big scam to keep selling you new players (profits for the player manufacturers) and new "digitally remastered" crap you've already bought before. But then, "digitally remastered" is a total profit segment. They don't pay the artists squat for album sales anyway and every one of these remastered discs is pure profit for them. They don't even incur advertising costs to promote it.

I know it's vulgar to depict this as being all about the money. But it is vulgar. And it is all about the money.

BTW, you can get decent sound cards with mixers that have a higher audio sampling rate. If you want to record or convert your vinyl (just in case), you can store stuff now at a very high bitrate. That overcomes many of the problems with digital music. And it will get better in coming years as they bring newer and cheaper players to market.

Even some of the modern, alt-country artists like the Jayhawks, Son Volt and Wilco (who, by the way are a good example of how filesharing actually helps musicians) sound way better played on tube equipment. I've tweaked the equalization on Windows Media Player to try to approximate this, but I can't even get it close.

Keep your old stuff. Take good care of it. You'll never be able to get any more like it. Consider yourself lucky. Kids today don't even know about the golden age of analog electronics. We have wonderful stuff and neat tech stuff today. But good as it is in features and miniaturization, your analog stuff is like cruising in a heavy battleship and the new stuff is like a bunch of PT boats with gaudy paint jobs.