'Better' of course is subjective. Recording equipment is much more sophisticated nowadays, no doubt about that. But my ears tell me that recordings from decades past sound better. Part of the problem is recording and mastering techniques, part of the problem is the music itself.

Moss and bandages aside, a singer or a musician who knows his craft will make a better record than someone who relies on cut and paste multitracking to 'assemble' a recording. No reason it has to be so, but contemporary recording techniques do make it easier to take the easy way out. CD mastering is indeed a problem. Because contemporary music is often all about volume, everyone wants to have the loudest CD on the block. And the closer you get to digital zero, the more compressed the recording and the more limited the dynamics. It just sounds fake to me.

Grab, if Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen make your list of great guitar players, then you and I probably are not going to agree on anything musically. And that saturated distortion of Little Richard recordings and the slightly off-key sound of plunky old pianos are part of listening experience for me, I wouldn't give it up for all the digital precision in the world.

I do love CDs as a format for reissues, though. That Charlie Poole box-set is great, the only way I would have heard a lot of that stuff.