Even a fairly cheap turntable usually sounds smooth and easy on the ear, perhaps to the point of being boring but the err on the safe side. Digital is the opposite. There are far more nasty sounding CD players than turntables. The reason is very simple. Unlike a turntable, digital distortion is not analogous to the music signal and grates on the ear more. A poor turntable might sound dull and uninteresting but poor digital is truly horrible.
Of course there are horrible turntables and lovely digital sources. That's not the point. It's the type of distortion they can produce that matters.
Which imperfections annoy me most may be different to the ones that annoy you most of course, but as a generalisation this looks right to my ear.
However, we do need to watch out for those generalisations and for confirmation biases and for prejudices built up over 40 years of listening mostly to cheaper CD players and turntables.
No too long ago (but before my LP12 got a Karousel or Lingo 4), I played CD and LP of a few albums to a friend while standing in front of the preamp. He is a very good conductor (not in UK) and a musician of no small skill, and almost infinitely better than me at understanding music and at critical listening. From college days, he 'knew' what LPs sounded like - scratches, jumps, hissing, rumbling to cover small detail and loose bass - and didn't understand why I had one. He has been firmly all-digital since 1985 but still 'knew' what LPs sound like.
I stood in front of the preamp and swapped things around. He was mid-way through pointing to specific areas of CD superiority on version 2 of album 1 (stereo image, precision in deep bass, lower sibilance and more realism on close-miked female vocals) and was just waiting for an example of 'no overhang as sudden sounds end' - when we got to the first surface click on that LP.
After some hours, we concluded that on some albums he still preferred CD and found it more realistic while I found some unrealistically hard and flat and others unnaturally smooth in treble. For most albums, if you ignored surface noise, we actually agreed which was better (usually a small gap), and it wasn't always the LP. Mostly, LP won on older recordings, but there were even a couple where the 'digitally remastered' LP was not ruined but actually more involving and open than the CD.
There were also several where (under firm challenge and with him doing the disguising this time) I had to admit that the CD was indeed less good than LP - but the stream from the NDX2/ XPSDR was at least as good as the LP - most (but not all) of the classical & jazz recordings after about 1990 fitted into that category. Messier still, my old Tres Hombres LP was clearly better than CD, but my pristine 180g replacement LP actually lost to my ear against CD if I couldn't see the preamp.
Typical digital imperfections still annoy my ear more than typical LP imperfections, if you see what I mean, and my best 20 or 30 listening experiences are all on LP. However, I have got a lot less black-and-white on LP versus CD in recent years.
As for Mr. Knopfler's output, my understanding is that he takes great care on the whole process and really works on the final version, which leads quickly to the digital world. I wouldn't assume that Brothers iIn Arms would sound better to my ear if it had been all analogue too. On the other hand, I'd rather listen to the first 2 albums - is that just because of how they are recorded or more to do with the music?
Finally, if the gap at the high-end were as black-and-white as some here seem to assume, wouldn't Linn going digital on the current phono stage make a Klimax-style LP12 sound like a CD player?
