Back when I was a young man, I was ready to jump on every new bandwagon. Screw the old stuff, new stuff is better, right?
I got my first CD player early in the 80s, when I was trying to pretend to be a yuppy. I had a portable (roughly twice the size of an average walkman... Although I had a really tiny walkman smaller than a cassette case, that popped up and clamped onto the tape). Anyway, the sound was amazing (I thought), even through shitty foam-padded crapphones of the 80's. No static at all...
I know for a fact that my hearing is not what it was then (my kids hear frequencies I don't). But today I am listening to Steely Dan's Royal Scam on a low-end Audio-Technica turntable and those transparent Harman-Cardon speakers from some years back, and it's freakin' amazing. And digital stuff sounds just so-so.
What is it about analog that is just so good? I had many theories about it over the years. Fundamentally, I think, 44KHz is just too low. Of course the human ear does not go anywhere near that, but the cutoff interferes with harmonics in a way that is not quite right. And filtering is hard to get right when the sampling frequency is within an order of magnitude of what you can hear.
16 bits is probably enough, when mixed right. I imagine a few high bits are never used, a few low bits are not perceptible anyway. Perhaps it would work better to double the sampling rate and go with fewer bits, and a dynamic range compressor controlled by an extra channel, along with a noise-shaping algo of some sort.
I don't know what kids use today for compressing audio. I hope it's better than video, although it is getting decent too - largely through increases in resolution though. Kind of like shitty software that piggybacks on faster-and-faster CPUs to remain tolerable. Eventually artifacts become small enough to not be noticeable, and backs are slapped. Stuff on Amazon Music and other streaming services is just so blah - mediocre.
A few years ago I borrowed a musician-friend's old tube amp, and it sounded incredible, again. Warm, delicious sound. Noise and distortion sound so good, too! Also, this 10-Watt amp blew walls down in loudness. My 200-watt home system was not even in the running, with its sizeable speakers sounding like they were ripping at a fraction of the volume this guitar amp delivered. I suppose marketing got to measure watts somewhere else for consumer products, like at the wall socket.
And then there is the physical aspect of holding an LP, placing it on the turntable, fiddling with the needle. The 20-or-so-minutes to do something. I used to write meaningful chunks of code before flipping the record. Now poof -- 20 minutes is over, and I am not even finished blabbing about records. The other side is starting, and my fingers are very happy.
Anyway, I am happy to listen to records for a bit while I am here.