So in general, many vinyls actually do sound more dynamic and clear. It's not because of the media, but because of how they were produced at different times in the industry.
You can generally tell it's there when you put the CD in your car and say "Hey that's too quiet"... that's a good candidate for some more serious listening.
It wasn't an absurdly high end Philips deck, but it was into the range where they spent to put in good analogue circuitry -- what happens to the signal after the D/A converter gets done with it.
The CD format didn't obviate the need to take care of and spend on the rest of the delivery mechanism. And not on the associated marketing hype, but on good and well-matched components.
CD's were a revelation -- in the right production hands. But then they became coasters played in $50 boom boxes.
And they never outright obviated high quality analogue recordings and playback. They presented an interesting addition and counter-point to audio reproduction.
I doubt that scrape survives very well at 192 Kbps.
But, yeah, it is all kinds of frustrating to discover that the band you like has no listenable recordings. There's stuff that literally just needs to be played in the car.
The wakeup call came when I converted my vinyl to CD myself with nothing but the built-in ADC on my Mac and it still sounded better than the commercial release.
I'm just a guy and I know your fucking track shouldn't clip ever. They ruined that song.
I'm not suggesting a crappy mic and no brains is all it takes to produce a record, but your home PC these days can handle the mixing that it used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear to do, and good recording gear can still cost a pretty penny, but it must be getting better and cheaper like everything else. We've seen more well-produced stuff by "amateurs" these days than any time in the past...
Digital audio workstations are, indeed, a lot cheaper. But they're just one piece of equipment, and it's capital equipment at that. (That is, you buy it once and then use it for years, to produce hundreds of recordings. You don't pay by the hour and it doesn't wear out rapidly with use, though it does become gradually obsolete.)
The rest of your kit includes mics, preamps, amps, cables, consoles with jacks and lights and knobs and sliders, power supplies, stands, properly designed studios with isolation and acoustical treatments and talkback mics and quiet air conditioning, and so forth. Although almost none of the technology behind these things has changed since 1965, they are a bit cheaper today, because we've gotten more productive at manufacturing. But they aren't "Moore's Law cheaper". Meanwhile, revenues from music sales are "Moore's Law smaller".
The other thing that hasn't gotten cheaper is the time. Audio engineers are trained experts. Setting up all those mics and positioning them right and listening critically to the results through take after take is necessarily time-consuming, and your audio pros need to be around most of that time, fiddling with things. And they're paid by the hour.
There are definitely specific genres of recording that are in their golden age. If you like the sound of stuff that doesn't bother with all the recording techniques that have been patiently developed since the 1950s, but just parks a few mics around the garage and plugs them into the 4-track, you're all set, because every part of the production chain after the 4-track has tiny capital cost now, and distribution is cheap. If you stick to digital instruments, you're all set. If your talent consists of taking samples and mixing them into music, or spending months recording one track at a time in your bathroom with strategically placed towels on the walls and a single decent mic, and then mixing and transforming the results in post using that cheap DAW, things are pretty good for you. And lord knows that there's never been a better time to be an amateur audio engineer.
But if you want the modern equivalent of, say, Revolver? Decreasingly economical, unless it's part of a larger project, like a show or a soundtrack.
Short lengths of clipping (just a few samples) or clipping on drums can't usually be heard. The one thing that will always start sounding bad right away is clipped vocals, but that doesn't usually happen on professional recordings. These people know what they're doing.
If you open up all your favorite albums in a wave editor and rage everytime you see clipping, you'll be doing a lot of raging. But most of those sound engineers know their stuff and aren't being stupid. Worry about how it sounds, not how it looks.