Music
the best I've listened to is evangelion jazz night, without a doubt.
Discussion
TL;DR - I've officially concluded that there is not one format to rule them all. This may have been obvious all along, but it's now very clear to me.
As a background, been getting into the audiophile hobby over the last several years - started dabbling in vinyl in 2017ish, but like many people, went much deeper in the last few years. I'm also an amateur musician - not a great one, but enough that I like to think I have a decent ear for details.
I've primarily been collecting vinyl lately, and it's been a blast (albeit, an expensive blast) - but when I was a kid, everything I bought was on CD. I have a big collection of old CDs from the late 80's / 90's / 2000's.
Recently, I bought the Jar of Flies vinyl reissue. I've been kicking myself the last few years for not buying the Music on Vinyl press when I definitely saw it on shelves in the 2017/2018 timeframe, so was excited it was finally getting reissued. To say I was enormously disappointed in the reissue is an understatement. Poorly pressed, mastered too bright, lots of distortion, etc. The disappointment was so strong that I went into storage and dug out all my old CDs and an old CD player. Plugged the player into my new speakers, not expecting much...
...but I was blown away. My original Jar of Flies CD is so much more dynamic, balanced, and clear than the recent vinyl reissue. This led me down a path of listening to a few other favorites from that era - Nevermind, Superunkonwn, Ten - and I was frankly blown away by all of them. Superunknown and Ten I actually think sound better on CD than the versions I have on vinyl. I also spent decent money on an original European vinyl press of Nevermind, which sounds amazing - but the original CD is really damn close, and of course with none of the surface noise.
So I kept going. One of my other all time favorite albums is Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age. Listening to the CD, I had the entirely opposite reaction - brickwalled to hell, no space between the instruments, and a complete wall of sound compared to my vinyl copy, which sounds much more dynamic and wide.
Another, Tales from the Punchbowl by Primus, which I don't own on vinyl - but compared to Tidal streaming - and it was also pretty compressed and loud on CD. I've always known about the loudness war, and been able to hear it in certain cases, but some of these CDs from the mid-late 90's / early 2000's bring it to the next level (Songs for the Deaf is one of the worst offenders, but others like Californication and Stadium Arcadium by RHCP are pretty bad too)
I have always known conceptually that format doesn't make as much of a difference as mastering - but this exercise made me realize how drastically different mastering can be between different formats. In the end - I'm now even more sucked into the audiophile hobby and I'm excited to continue to go down this path (and maybe even start comparing some of my dad's CD copies of albums from the 60's / 70's / 80's to the original vinyl copies I inherited from him)
