Digital samples the music, which by definition means it is taking momentary "snapshots" of the music as it plays. The sampling frequency can be extremely high, but even so there are still instants where no music is sampled, which means that a moment of the music is not stored for reproduction. Now, others can argue whether or not this makes a difference in sound quality (I don't have enough time or energy to), but this means that information is lost.
Oh, fer cryin' out loud.
Does anyone ever take the time to think about why we measure these things in Hz? Which is a fancy way of saying
cycles per second? Because sound is a vibration. The faster it vibrates, the higher the tone.
There is no information that is "skipped" by some "snapshot" process. Sound is not some sort of infinitely complex stream that can only be captured by the "magic" of a vinyl record spinning at 33 1/3 rpm -- it is a series of easily measurable events happening at easily measureable rates. Period. As long as you're sampling fast enough to capture all of these events, you've captured the sound.
There's an argument to be made that 44.1 is too low, and some audible effect could be caused by putting the limit at 22.05 kHz. But that's not the fault of digital, it's the fault of a specific implementation of digital.
Similarly, you could argue that 16 bits isn't enough, though I have to wonder about that. It's plenty to capture dynamic range far in excess of any LP. Which makes statements like this:
Never thought it possible for digital to have the dynamic range of Lp's.
especially puzzling.
When someone expresses a preference for some LP over some CD (or vice versa), we're talking about different tape sources and different mastering (and euphonic distortion and placebo effect) here, not any inherent advantage in one medium over another.
Ryan