Depends on your starting point for the discussion.
If, like me, you believe that enhanced musical enjoyment comes with better technical performance then I would naturally have to disagree with the rest of your statement.
My point, (see above), is how do you know any given piece of kit has "better technical perormance"? Sure it's easy to measure whether it is accurate to its input, but is that neccisarily going to give a more accurate final reproduction? Answer of course is dependant on what you are trying to reproduce, the original recording or the original sound of the instruments in that recording?
As I stated above, the second is impossible to know so how can we as individuals with no knowlege of the original instruments make any valid judgment as to the "accuracy" of the kit we're trying to evaluate? Simple, we can't so any such evaluations are by definition always going to be subjective. The first is also impossible to actually know with any certainty, as we don't know what the original master sounds like, so the best we can do is
assume that if every peice of kit in the replay chain is measureably accurate to it's input the resulting sound must therefore be accurate to the original master. However, don't ever be fooled in to believing this is anything more than an
assumption as it can
never be verified without a techical analysis of the original master itself.
IMO vinyl is both technically and musically inferior to CD, though of course if the mastering differs markedly between the two versions the preference may switch.
Technically certainly, musically as you say that's your opinion, others would disagree. When it comes to such subjective opinions there is of course no wrong or right.
For the record, I am half way between the two camps. My head tells me to choose technically accurate equipment, but at the end of the day I ultimately judge subjectively with my ears. If what I hear doesn't correspond to my own subjective memory of what live instruments sound like I will reject it. I tend to evaluate equipment by listening to as varied genres of music (from sources that I am familiar with) as I can, generally aiming for reproduction that has the fundamental values of what the relevant individual instruments should (in my mind) sound like, allowing for the fact that I have no actual accurate frame of reference. I tend to hold to the tenet that an "accurate" system will make different recordings sound different from each other. If every recording has a homogeneous sound then I conclude it must be the system that is imposing it's own sound on the replay.
