But give the ability I'd go back and get an old Porsche 356 Speedster.
The Miata is superior technically in every way. But I just love the old Porsche for its history, aesthetics and legacy, and thats the car I'd always prefer.
I don't think any of this is any sort of reflection on what kind of "hacker" I am.
Yes, you could record a vinyl losslessly and it would sound indistinguishable from the vinyl. But why bother, when you already own loads of vinyl and are familiar with that format? Plus some people enjoy the 'ritual' of vinyl, the sense of ownership not offered by digital music, and the way that medium places focus on records as self-contained works, rather than as a collection of songs from which people 'pick-and-mix'.
Don't get me wrong, I love all digital music has to offer, but I'm just saying there are still plenty of reasons to listen to vinyl too.
I own nearly a thousand vinyl records, and I recorded them digitally and play them through my Audiotron (crackle and all). I bother because playing vinyl records is a bother. They need to be cleaned regularly, dinking around with the records is more work than just pushing a button. Some of them are warped and to get them to play ya gotta put slight pressure on the needle.
I did try various software to remove clicks, but it made the recordings sound muffled.
But I do like the smell of the turntable & records. It's analogous to the pleasing smell of an old paperback novel. Can't have everything.
You could go out of your way to try to simulate all the mechanical interactions, but why? What is so important about faking something?
No. Sampling truly analog data always involves approximating.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28signal_processing%2...
Notice how they use the term "theoretical ideal sampler".
Now, it is the case, as user rayiner mentioned, that there can be advantages to using more than the required number of bits and samples (though not quite for the reasons he mentioned). For starters, you do need an anti-aliasing filter between the signal source and your ADC. Increasing the sample rate reduces the complexity of the AA filter, and digital-domain math can make up for it (and increase the effective number of bits, to boot!). But when you go to reproduce the signal, there's no good reason to use more samples and bits than necessary. That was the whole point of the "Niel Young paper" that has been linked to so many times.
Vinyl does not come close to the limits of consumer-grade recording devices (except maaaaaybe in certain bands, but that can be dealt with by using noise-shaping techniques). Does that make those who like the sound of vinyl bad people? No. Just like those who enjoy sitting in front of a wood fireplace are not bad people. Gas fireplaces have a lot of advantages, but some people like the crackling of the wood and the smell it produces.
[1] Tektronix made a very nice set of (entirely analog) sampling oscilloscopes in the 1960's which used sampling techniques to measure high frequency signals (on the order of 1GHz when contemporary continuous-signal CROs could barely reach 100MHz). These oscilloscopes displayed discrete-time, continuous-amplitude signals, and deliberately excluded the anti-aliasing filter I mentioned above (though it wasn't true heterodyning as most RF people would think of it, because samples were taken based a delay from a trigger recognizer, and thus not necessarily equally spaced in time).
[2] Signals below the noise floor are outside the scope of this discussion and usually require some form of synchronous detection (like a lock-in amplifier) or frequency-spreading / -despreading (like GPS).
The page you listed also says: "There has been an industry trend towards sampling rates well beyond the basic requirements; 96 kHz and even 192 kHz are available.[1] This is in contrast with laboratory experiments, which have failed to show that ultrasonic frequencies are audible to human observers"