BE,
I believe your negativity towards vinyl is directed at its technical imperfections - Yes vinyl measure poorly - but while as an engineer measurements are a "Badge of Honour" my whole reason for basically dedicating my life's work is to the reproduction of Music.
Its my experience that the only format avaible to the consumer that REALLY sounds realistic (Ignoring the Crackles and Pops!) is high quality vinyl (And possible with PURE DSD).
As Misterdog has pointed out decent vinyl does not come cheap - a budget Vinyl setup can put one off for life.
Its my experience that unlike any PCM I've heard DSD is to all extent "Transparent" so if it can digitise the quality of a High quality vinyl system then I'm good with it!
I DON'T CARE about technical performance if it sounds wrong - at the end of the day only capturing the "Beauty" of Music matters to me - PCM Digital is unable to really sound "Transparent / realistic" to me.
PLEASE I don't want to start a stupid never ending circular argument about how "prefect" Digital is! Its REALLY NOT in my interest to pan Digital - however I hope that with the FDAC's FPGA platform we can try some ideas that I believe should help close the gap between PCM & DSD.
The reason the FDAC has the ADC option is so that we can "Master" known source material.
I wasnt actually trying to be negative in my comments above, I just asked what your definition of "correct" was and what your experience was of doing direct comparisons to live as you have done with digital.
However, as you have "pushed" the subject, yes I do also find all the technical imperfections that manifest as things like general distortion, end of side distortion, noise, clicks, pick up (feedback) from speakers, speed/pitch instability etc etc etc quite unbearable. That's got nothing whatsoever to do with my opinions regarding measurement or technical performance, that's just some of the gross and very obviously AUDIBLE limitations of the format.
I really just dont like the sound, and personally I dont find it realistic (yes I do go to listen to live music of all sorts classical/jazz) quite regularly.
The fact that a 12" 45 rpm of the same tracks invariably sounds quite different (ie much better) than 33 rpm LP also tells me that the lower speed is fundamentally limited, regardless of the quality of the setup (yes I have heard high end turntables).
Tell me, how does digitally recorded vinyl sound to you?
But hey, I have no criticism of what sound people like.