I've occasionally the same effect via some Telarc and Philips digital recordings released on viny between 1979 and 1983. That was prior to CD's commercial release in 1983. Those sound of those albums provided me with great anticipation for CD. In fact, the very fisrt CD I purchased was a release of one of those digitally mastered vinyl albums...I absolutely detested the CD version when I listened to it.
As for the technical cause, I'm uncertain. Perhaps, the groove noise produced by vinyl acts to strongly dither the digital master during vinyl replay. It's also been suggested elsewhere that low frequency groove noise is perceived by the ear as hall ambience. Perhaps, that is why CD is often perceived as dry or dead sounding compared to vinyl. However that's only speculation.
Well of course with the Telarc vinyl versus the CDs, they had the ability to cut from the 16/50 master, whereas they had to downsample that for CD - and that was in the days when downsampling to 44.1 was fraught with great difficulties, even nothwithstanding the notion (admittedly not shared by all audiophiles) that 44.1 is compromised to begin with. Nothing much back then sounded good when remastering for CD - in my opinion it wasn't until dCS made a hardware converter (dCS 972) that results we'd (or at least I) consider acceptable today were possible. Same with Philips Classics - they also used Soundstream which explains wh the digital vinyl sounded excellent. As I have pointed out on these forums elsewhere, arguably the biggest issue facing CD is the mere whole-tone worth of bandwidth above 20 Khz available for the low pass filter. It's a completely different sonic story at a 50 Khz sampling rate where it becomes (almost) possible to have a completely transparent filter. Infact Telarc started using a modified Sony PCM recorder that operated at 44.1 Khz from the mid 1980s. I assume they did this because they obtained better results for their CD releases than continuing to use the Soundstream equipment with it's superior (but commercially and technically awkward at the time) sample rate.
As for digital vinyl sounding great, well I have to stick my head out here and say that it often doesn't sound any better (at best) than the pure digital equivalent unless the remastering engineer is doing specific things in order to subjectively improve the sound (such as applying EQ). Yes, they generally use high quality converters that are externally clocked which will often result in a better sounding analogue input to the lathe than what a typical audiophile may have at home, but in my experience, digital vinyl cut from a 16/44.1 master really doesn't sound that good unless that master sounds good to begin with. And it certainly doesn't sound as good as the digital master unless as mentioned, some fiddling around is done to make it subjectively better sounding.
Once they start to use recently produced 24/96 masters made by world class engineers, the vinyl will sound great, assuming of course the 24/96 does as well. Abbey Road are doing classical vinyl in this way - if they don't already have the 24/96 master from Universal, for example, they will make one when they do the vinyl release and you'll often find the same title come out on 24/96 download as well. I'm seeing this with Warner Classics, for example.
But I don't really think there is any technical reason that digital vinyl sounds great. I can attest that any vinyl title I own myself where I have two versions of the exact same recording (one from the analogue master and one from the digital one), the analogue title wins hands-down. Infact, even the Speakers Corner Mercury releases from some years back sound better than the later reissues made using the 16/44.1 files, and those Speakers Corner titles were made with second generation tapes (the 16./44.1 masters from first generation tapes). So you could say that by imposing a digital step in vinyl production, it potentially does more damage than a second generation tape does, though I feel that only applies if 16/44.1 sources are used. With the latest releases from studios such as Abbey Road, I wouldn't even know if there were any digital steps involved or not.
Of course, with digitally sourced vinyl, many avenues are available to remastering engineers that are not available in the analogue domain, but that in itself could be the subject of a very long thread!
