There is one criterion on which the LP still wins - time resolution. The human ear can perceive differences in the 5-to-10-microsecond range (you can prove thi

There is one criterion on which the LP still wins - time resolution. The human ear can perceive differences in the 5-to-10-microsecond range (you can prove this by testing our ability to work out where a sound came from, based on differences in arrival time at our ears). Successive samples on a CD are 22 microseconds apart - so a CD cannot encode two impulses 5us apart[0]. An analogue medium like vinyl, however, can do just that. Some audio engineers speculate that this is what underlies the supposed "digital sound" - people are in fact identifying a loss of timing information. [0] It gets complicated fast, here - the Nyquist theorem says a CD can easily encode a 5us phase difference between two tones - and if the human ear were a linear device with a strict low-pass filter in front of it, that would be the same thing as a 5us time difference between impulses. But the ear is wickedly nonlinear and seems to "care" about impulses for reasons that make obvious evolutionary sense. Long story short, for all their faults LPs do seem to have distinct advantages over CDs when it comes to time resolution.