My new turntable came last night and after I hooked it up, one my sons was free, so I took him down stairs to my listening room and showed him the huge sound quality difference between CD and Vinyl. I was surprised, because he was NOT surprised.

This son is a senior in college with a double major in Physics and Math (With a full scholarship). He mentioned that one of the classes he took on Fourier Transforms had a big section on "Gibbs Phenomenon", which describes one of the weakness in modern day signal processing algorithms.

He said that while higher sampling rate can minimize this effect, that changes in dynamics are almost impossible for CD/SACD systems to be made to sound as good as Vinyl. Further higher frequencies are more problematic for CD/SACD systems.

This then explains why CD's sound 'harsh' to me AND music with more percussion sounds distorted. It's because there missing many of the harmonics.

Not sure if this is new to you, but it was me. I've attached a couple of links for your reading pleasure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon

http://www.stereophile.com/features/424/index8.html