I agree in principle, but most engineers still think the best recordings were made on analog tape pressed to vinyl and that format posed a lot of challenges to audio when it came to preserving the overall sonic performance. I mean, it didn't capture anything below about 60hz at all and everything over 10k was essentially lost. It had its own natural compression in the low midrange. Yet, pretty much any engineer will tell you it is preferable to the harshness of digital. I think that is mainly due to the fact that it really represented well what is in our audible range. Digital has a tendency to create a real harshness in the high middle range of the signal. That is right in humans' range for hearing making it even more painful if it sounds bad. In addition, many of the frequencies more accurately reproduced by digital recordings are completely outside of the audible range of humans. I mean, it's great and all if you can get 30hz from a stereo or 20k, but no one is going to know except the dog.
and humans hear in analog in general, i agree about the harshness of many digital recordings, particualrly early ones. that said, digital playback has gotten much better over the years, and you can get performance today from sub-1k players that 3 years ago would have cost you over $3k (true quote from a customer: "$700 bucks for a CD player?!!? what's it gonna do, blow me?!?") and in any case, the argument about analog vs. digital is irrelevant when we're discussing mp3 vs. FLAC.
