Strangely, I think the best sounding bit of kit I had on my old separates system was my Denon Radio (TU-260), when compared to a Marantz CD player (6000 OSE).
I think it must boil down to personal taste of your medium of choice.
Any form of recording is by definition a compression of sound. Very few, if any, recordings can be completely "loss-less" despite being called that. That said, listening to a recording of any piece of music, compared to being at the live performance, will never be the same experience. Arguably, depending on your musical taste, could be worse in terms of sound quality.
Listening to a band in a stadium with the sound echoing, isn't likely to be as good as a studio recording.
Listening to Opera at the ROH, well it depends where you sit. Sit in the Gods, or sat in the stalls, what you hear is different.
Even if Clapton played just to you, no microphone, a-capella on a acoustic guitar, would that sound-staging be better than properly recorded stereo, sat the right distance, with carefully positoned speakers etc - or even a very nice pair of headphones?
The point of all of this is that you can never create perfection, it is all too subjective.
As for vinyl, surely the real reason its preferred is because of the physical nature of it, the process of it, the imperfections of it all of which creates the nostalgia of playing a vinyl. It's subjective.
The point I was trying to make was a more objective one, between a 320kbps mp3, vs whatever quality Catman and the like were recording at. As that is measurable, I wonder if you played the same song at 320kbps vs ~1,000kbps, whether the difference would be heard?
I know what you can hear is also person dependent, but at least that would be a measurable test.
