Quote:
Instead, what the home capturing equipment is going to do is take that LP sound and do all of the things to it that you dislike about digital CD recordings in the first place.


I think there are two things going on here:

1. When you digitise the signal, there is some degradation as you say - but I find this is relatively benign - i.e. there is something missing but it's not hurting my ears.

2. With commercial CDs, however, many have a harsh zingy quality which is very obvious in the car and makes me want to switch off after a few minutes. Home burned CDs from either vinyl transfers or downloaded MP3s don't seem to have this problem. When commercial CDs were the only digital source available, I blamed 16/44 digitisation but the above experience doesn't bear this out. Now I suspect it's something to do with the way CDs are manufactured (don't ask me what). It does seem that throwing lots of money at the CD player can help as I've heard some very expensive units which don't show the problem but since only about 5% of my music is on CD I'm not prepared to spend the money buying one. Some people explain this by jitter (small variations in the timing of the digital stream caused by the physical mechanism of the transport causing the DAC to output the wrong result) but if this is so, why do home produced and some commercial disks sound OK ? Maybe it's just me.