I am not talking about Mp3's here.
My sound interface is capable of recording in 24 Bit 128 Khz sample rate, in that aspect and taking into account how old CD technology is by now, I would call CD quality inferior.
Technology based on digital systems do not age well.
Professional studio recording standard is 24 Bit 96 Khz, not speaking of that most customers chose to just buy the Mp3 version anyway, or that maybe even the original masters are not being made available in higher quality than what a CD is capable of reproducing, unless it come out on on vinyl, or is available on that media in a true analog version where there have been no digital downgrading of the source involved.
With good equipment to reproduce audio the difference between CD quality and 24 Bit 96 Khz quality will be almost as apparent as the difference between 128 Kb/s Mp3 quality and 16 Bit 44,1 Khz Cd quality.
So yes CD quality is very much inferior to today's digital standards, and digital technology will always have inherent limitations making it inferior to analog systems of similar quality in the aspect of reproducing information that is true and accurate to the source.
Analog technology by definition reproduce all the information and subtleties of the original source, in theory at least a 1:1 relationship, only limited by quality of the hardware, digital technology on the other hand will always be an approximation or emulation basically made up of 0's and 1's.
Digital equipment will in other words always be limited by how fast it can pick up and process the information coming form the source, cause in a digital system information will with 100% certainty be left out, maybe not on a level that humans consciously are able to perceive if we are talking recent digital standards, but non the less it will miss a lot of information.
That can be useful in some situations, sometimes you would want a system to not to pick up what would be cocidered irrelevant information in the context.
In the very nature of how digital systems work always having to shut on and off, basically everything a digital system reproduce will be split up in small chunks of information, hence why we call it resolution, with analog technology the flow of information is unbroken and you will have all of it, again theoretically, which means the resolution will basically be infinite.
Pictures are a nice and easy way to understand this:
Digital pictures will have a limit of how much you can zoom in depending on how many squares the given digital system is capable of reducing the source to.
Analog pictures will only be limited by the quality of the lens used to capture the light that makes up the picture.
At this point it is still not possible to make a digital camera that is capable of splitting the information it receives up in so small parts that it is more sufficient at reproducing a accurate image then the most clear and powerful lens we can make are at picking up light.
Digital systems no doubt are much cheaper, flexible and predictable though.
And to have a system that can reuse information and easily can be programmed to handle almost whatever kind of information in whatever way you may wish just by lining up the right sequence of something and nothing while not easily being disturbed by irrelevant information, instead of having to physically create systems made from scratch each time it has to take new assignment or task, is no doubt very practical, but it doesn't make it better in every aspect, far from.
Analog is still better at being true to the source material, even if that means picking up irrelevant information in the context such as "noise" from the system it self.
Maybe a bit like the difference between playing with Lego and clay.
Both have their obvious strength and weaknesses, but one thing is for sure if you put clay into a mold you will get something that looks like what formed the mold almost exactly, if using Lego blocks, well not that much.
