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For example, it is possible to reproduce a perfect 1 kHz sine wave even though the digital data has gaps.

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You've been reading too many suc^H^H^Haudiophile zines. Digital encoding is generally immune to any such imaginations. Sure a crappy mechanism could, in theory, screw it up, but I really doubt there are any decks that crappy in existence, since it's pretty easy to get it right with a digital signal.

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I would rather go back to tape.

You must have very unique hearing if you prefer the sound of tape to CDs.

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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.

That sounds like something that could easily be solved with a little EQ. Painstakingly re-ripping a bunch of vinyl records sounds like going the long way around to me. But suit yourself. If you've already found some vinyl rips and you like their sound, then by all means carry on!

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It seems that at least at that facility, that the lacquer master was being produced from a digital source.

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I would rather go back to tape.

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You must have very unique hearing if you prefer the sound of tape to CDs.

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It depends, if he's talking about 1/4inch reel to reel on a good recorder at 15 or 30 IPS then it is a 'very' close call compared to CD or DAT. I only wish I could retrieve my Studer from under the stairs!

However if it's compact cassette then I agree with you!

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The CD reproduction depicted in that graph is indistinguishable from the original. The tone is 10KHz, and the CD reproduction clearly has a very strong 10KHz component. The difference between the CD reproduction and the original tone consists entirely of frequencies too high to hear. The people who chose the sampling frequency of CD audio were not idiots, they were audio engineers. The subsequent people who chose a higher frequency for DVD audio were also not idiots, but they were marketers. 192KHz audio is snake oil. AFAIK no human listener has ever distinguished 44.1KHz audio from 192KHz audio in a double-blind test.

I would bet with the right source, one could.

Remember that with digital sampling, you have to limit the source to less than half the sampling rate to prevent aliasing, leaving only 22khz. 12khz sounds would be made of four level changes.

When CDs first came out, I was into classical big time, and I found the violins nasty sounding. Very distorted. This is really the only instrument that I could hear a difference on, but it was a big one.

Fairly quickly, the engineers did learn to manipulate the bits to get frequency response above 12khz without aliasing. Sony had a line of digital recorders with Super Bit Mapping (SBM) that did this. I bought one for encoding my classical LPs, since at that time nasty encodings of classical works was the norm. The Sony thing did work well, but I never use it any more. I still listen to those encoded LPs...

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The MP3s I have tried and liked are not vinyl rips but downloaded from legit music sites but don't exhibit the zingy quality I am trying to avoid, so my problem is not with digital audio per se but some commercial CDs.