Digital Music Is A Mess

Analog music is a straight-to-electrical-signal procedure that occurs after "reading" the analog medium which actually encapsulates the music, it IS the music (eg the grooves of a vinyl).

Digital music on the other hand is a straight up cloning process where the digital file serves as a detailed guide on how the digital-to-analog converter (DAC)  should construct the electrical signal from scratch.

One can easily realize how abnormal cloning sounds if he brings it to human cloning territory, for instance. Even the most analytical directions on how to do it still does not guarantee a natural result.

The reason I mentioned this is to show how difficult the task of a digital file is and how easily an abomination can occur. Because the goal is to have a perfect replica of the originally recorded sound, otherwise it is something else and thus... a failure.

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The problem has been all along that music experts and engineers never managed to figure out what was wrong with the "clone" music. Their main focus has always been to use their equipment properly (which is good of course) 

and trying to level up the specs of the digital files (eg samplerate), apparently based on the belief that a digital file will sound the most natural when its specs reach maximum/infinite levels.

That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact my experience has shown me that those "hi-res" files tend to exaggerate the problems/flaws of digital files.

After a long long research I have to admit that Harry Nyquist was right. In short, he proved that to PERFECTLY reproduce a sound wave digitally you would need a sample rate that is 2 times as much as the highest frequency of the sound. So for sounds to match our hearing's highest frequency which is 20khz we would need a 40khz samplerate. So the CD which is 44.1khz is actually MORE than capable for the task!

But here I am, stating that the CD falls short too, so what's the deal, you might ask.

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A CD contains all the musical information we need BUT not without the following 2 major FLAWS:

1) NOISE: Music information is mixed with noise and as a result a new "hybrid" sound is created.

2) OUT OF TUNE: Music is literally out of tune, off key.

These 2 problems play a major role on how we perceive our music subconsiously and it is because of them that our brain knows it is a recording and not real. 

And of course let's not forget all the playback problems eg frequency responces, EQ's, "colored" amplification, sound renderers etc, but this site will not address any of these issues.