You are right
I have around 40 studio master 24bit albums. When Wilco brought out there new album
The Whole Love I purchased the CD and burnt it onto the Naz. A few months later the 24bit studio master came out so down loaded that also. The difference is very obvious when listening back to back. Have done this with a few albums , you pay a premium price for 24bit just now. Do you really think I would pay the extra cost if the difference in sound quality was very close ? Obviously your equipment comes into this also. SACD players play back 24bit recordings also and are superior to CD.
You have to ask yourself this. Is downloading good business sense for the music industry ?It has to be as costs can be brought down to the minimum. No destitution required , no factories required for the production of CD, No album covers need to be printed. This all adds up to bigger probability so its not rocket science every moves to probability.
So why has vinyl not disappeared? There are a hard core of people within the music industry who are enthusiasts for the vinyl and keep it alive. Its understandable simply because its the best sound quality you can get. Our ears hear in analog our hearing system is not digital.
iTunes are working in conjunction with Linn at the moment on their computer systems to start selling 24bit. A bunch of growing musicians are demanding that there music should be on 24bit. Neil Youngs exact words were I want my fans to hear how my music sounds in the recording studio not to be compressed in any way such as CD and MP3.
The CD is flawed has been since day one with error correction and spinning jitter. The CD will be produced for a few years yet but it will be faded out for sure.
Oh good grief. So much wrong in so few words...
1. When you are listening to the CD copy and the 24bit Studio Master, are you listening to the same master in both cases? The chances are you are not, and that will significantly cloud your judgment
2. If you are paying a premium, you are expecting a premium product. That not only clouds your judgment, but influences those making the masters ("this is the audiophile master, which goes to snooty, sound obsessed types who pay massively over the odds, so you had better do a good job!")
3. If one master is just a bit louder than the other, you will prefer it
4. Alternately, if one is significantly quieter than the other, you will think the quieter is the more 'considered' and therefore better, especially in classical music
5. When compared 'cetaris paribus', the differences between 16/44 and hi-res magically disappear
6. LP is a collector's format. It's been kept alive by the collector's love of collecting more than the audiophile's love of sound quality. The 'it sounds better' arguments are frequently debunked, but the debunking is swept aside by a Creationist-grade "I don't care" counter argument from the vinyl junkies
7. Neil Young is an old curmudgeon who has about as much understanding of how digital works as I have of why Neil Young remains popular
8. So a format that has error correction is better than one that demands personal error correction ("oh, you learn to listen past the pops and crackles and the jumps and the track damage and the build-up of fuzz on the needle")
9. I'd rather have a few picoseconds of jitter (that I can't hear) than end of side distortion (that I can)
10. AFAIK, Linn and Apple are not in discussions about 24bit. Linn's boss blogged about the rumour about Apple going to 24-bit in 2011. This was a mistaken reading of the Mastered For iTunes standards document, which recommends tracks submitted to Apple for the 'Mastered For iTunes' logo be submitted in 24/96, but this is to standardise Apple's encoding process. The same document also suggests files should be mastered with Sound Check taken into account, something that is anathema to the likes of Linn (this part is conveniently overlooked).