My $0.02:
The Great Gazoo is correct about how recording engineers had to somewhat manipulate recordings that were ending up on vinyl. In those instances, listening to it on vinyl will give you a “truer” playback of how the recording was intended to sound. However, all modern recordings are engineered to play back on digital equipment, so CD is the obvious choice for those.
You milage may vary, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, etc., etc.
My ear is not the highly tuned piece of audio equipment that most people on the internet seem to own. For example, i listen to mp3s at 128kbps and don’t notice any particular lack of quality, even on my $20 headphones. However, I’m told that if I spend more money on headphones I’ll be able to hear how crappy those mp3s are - strangely, I haven’t been tempted to do this.
This being said, I don’t miss vinyl. I like CDs. I grew up on vinyl and got my first CD player back in 87 and never looked back. There are albums on vinyl that never got released on CD, and I wish I had them on CD, but those are few and far between.
CD? Vinyl? Depends on the music, really … a lot of music made before 1990 sounds better on vinyl, IMHO. Post-1990 music tends to sound better on CD for some reason.
If you want to try something quite cool (and you use Winamp to listen to CDs/MP3s), download a neat little plug-in called iZotope Vinyl. ( http://www.izotope.com )
Simulates a turntable system, you can choose how worn the stylus is, how noisy the power supply is, how scratched and warped the track is etc. You can even select a pre-set ‘year’ to hear how your track would sound on a gramaphone/radiograph/hi-fi of the day. Quite funny listening to some stuff on the ‘1930’ setting … although this is probably a realistic setting to listen to Louis Armstrong on …
I have to concur that CD has, technically, superior quality. However, the reproduction of the music lacks the ‘warmth’ that it originally had on vinyl.
All I can say is thanks to iZotope Vinyl, my Boney M Gold and Abba Gold CDs sound fantastic! 