I have never ever seen a cd delaminate. Been buying and playing them since they came out 30 years ago, & never had a single incident of that.

I used to enjoy Arts writings, and Mikes too but there pro analog views have turned me off both of them.

I like my turntable as much as the next guy but it's by no means better than my transport/DAC, different but not better and the analog rig was 4 times more costly.

... and essentially similar. Because of that, I've found that a mechanically solid CD player and LP player will often have a similar sonic character. I would argue that the some of the items that CD proponents argue toward superiority don't really matter, because we can't hear them - first among them is channel separation, or because they are simply false - linear reproduction of frequency response.

The biggest reason for the former is that people cannot distinguish out past about 20-30 db of separation in standard stereo because we have din-aural hearing - and because the brain is going to "fill in" the missing bits by way of expectation bias, anyway. Stereo, from the Latin for "solid" has little to do with the number or arrangement of channels, but rather the illusion of soundscapes.

Also, keep in mind that at it's core, music recording is an electro-mechanical event. The brain understands the importance of impact and timing and timbre - which is where CD tends to fall the most flat.

The biggest reason for the latter is that the CD format is essentially good at reproducing static wave forms at or near frequency multiples of it's sampling rate. The grossest errors (warbling as you move away from sampling frequency multiples due to the fact that the wave form is never fully reaching it's upper and lower peak) which comes off as softness and flatness in the bass and harshness in the upper mid frequency range and of course jitter which can be mechanically or electrically born are far more a-musical than the relatively benign errors of analog reproduction, primarily wow and flutter.

That said, there is nothing really "wrong" with CD - it's just not really a reference. Especially for acoustic music.

It was about CD. And the relative merits of CD vs LP.

And even at that, at 44.1K there simply isn't the resolution to support truly analog resolution. I agree digital at high sample rate and highish bit depth is just fine. 44.1 PCM at it's best is still just good enough. It doesn't produce ambiance and decay in the way analog on a properly set up even moderately priced rig does and it doesn't do timing and coherence in the same way LP does. Single bit very high bit rate (DSD) is, however, very good and very analog indeed.

The scope of the discussion is important. And no, stereo (provided it's multi-channel), isn't number of channel dependent. You can, for example, get a very good "stereo" performance from 4 channel, even though there hasn't been a 4 channel format for some time.

It's actually somewhat amazing (from an engineering standpoint) that an LP playback system achieves anything close to high fidelity, given the inherent difficulties in both design and manufacture of a turntable, tonearm and cartridge. More, Art's contention that LP playback generates electric signal without any power input is simple-minded at best; in fact, I would suggest that one of the hardest things to do right in LP playback is getting accurate, stable speed from a playing record.