Yes, they were. Vinyl was heavily compressed AND band limited. Vinyl has crappy low AND high frequency response as well as inferior dynamic range compared to CD. Recording "these days" may be compressed horribly as well, but they are for different reasons.

"Two-and-a-bit samples isn't an awful lot better than two, especially if it's mixed together with other waves of similar frequencies (as real sounds usually are)."

It is absolutely, critically better, and mixing in other "waves" has no bearing on that.

"I'm not saying the high frequencies can't be reproduced, it's the shape of the waves I worry about."

Stop worrying.

"Does a 20kHz sine wave and a 20kHz sawtooth sound different when they're reproduced on a CD? They should..."

Not through and 20K band-limited system they don't, nor should they.

"eg. How does a CD store the difference between 22kHz square/sine/sawtooth waves?

It can't. It will even have trouble distinguishing them at 11kHz - well within the hearing limit."

It doesn't need to. Any 22K signal is entirely outside the passband of CD.

CD encoding has no trouble with 11K signals.

"Other problems: How do you even sample a 22kHz sine wave? Where do you put the sample points? How wide should they be? You can't use the beautiful 'dot' samples shown in the theory books - if the phase is wrong you might sample the zero-crossing points and not see any signal (in fact there's only one phase which would see the full signal - 90 degrees out of phase with the sampler would give a quieter output)."

CD doesn't attempt to reproduce 22K signals. The reason for the 44K sample rate is to leave some room for the anti-aliasing filters.

What Nyquist says is that you need a sample rate more than twice the highest frequency you wish to reproduce. You've deliberately violated that in your example. Even so, the actual sample rate is 44.1K so it's still theoretically possible, just impractical.

"CD sound is FAR from "Right, that's that sorted out then...". On the contrary, It's on the very limit of audio fidelity, only just good enough. To get a good result you need to sample at much higher frequency/resolution then process it down but even then the exact waveform of the high frequency waves is lost (you can argue over whether those differences are audible, I think they are)."

Your argument would be more persuasive if you had gotten anything you said right.

"These days we ought to be listening to 96kHz/24bit, the technology to reproduce it is ubiquitous. The problem is the MAFIAA doesn't want us to have it."

No, we shouldn't. That's the problem with people thinking beyond their pay grade.

Wow, that's quite a standard you have there. Quite the elite thinkers as well.

Vinyl was heavily compressed typically. Otherwise the grooves can't be placed close together. Anyone who says that there's no clipping in vinyl has no idea what is going on.

Laughable.

"If I had to choose I would go with my 300 pound Pioneer LaserDisc player. It was expensive as hell, and I did not have to flip the discs. The quality though was just shy of DVD and still analog video. That meant no artifacts and no degradation (well a heck of lot less without laser rot). It was a nicer looking picture to me."

Laserdisc was composite video. It had ENORMOUS degradation in the form of bandwidth limiting. Digital compression, with all its flaws, is far, far better at preserving information than Laserdisc's crude, sledgehammer approach. The only people who think that Laserdisc was good by today's standards are ignorant.

"Not to mention the audio was in many cases digital and the Elite players had optical connectors to your stereo system."

The audio of Laserdisc wasn't stereo, high bandwidth, or even digital!!! HiFi audio was bandaid'ed on after the fact. Pathetic. Then there was the crappy CAV/CLV choice where you got either good usability features at 30 minutes per side (rare) or got 60 minutes of video with poor usability. Embarrassing. Laserdisc sucked.

"I know it may sound crazy, but it really pisses me off when I see a $20+ Bluray title, with super high resolution compared to the LD, and yet still have bullshit encoding artifacts in high speed motion scenes. LD did not have that."

It's easy to produce a high quality image when there is no resolution. If a DVD were encoded using the Laserdisc's source signal you wouldn't see artifacting either, nor would you see a good picture. DVD's luma resolution is superior to LD but it's chroma resolution destroys LD due to the composite encoding. Then there's HD...

"LD is too much of a pain in the ass though, not to mention new titles are not exactly being sold either. Never did see a burner or blank ones around either....."

Wow, ridiculous. No one is making wax cylinders for Edison's phonograph either.

So he introduced a product that had marginal battery life, low capacity for a hard drive system, and only supported the Mac because it was "reserved for the superior customer experience". The original iPod sucked, too, and much of that was available technology of the time. Don't forget, additionally, that the iPod was developed by an outside company and purchased by Apple. Apple's dominance of mp3 was due to money, being a big name in an emerging market, and a commitment to incremental improvement. Apple was the IBM of mp3, it succeeded because of who it was, not the superiority of its product. That came later.

...and don't forgot "single link" and "dual link" plus 5 different connector standards.

Which are conditions that exist for virtually the entire population already.