I have a recording of Shostakovich's 13st by the Netherlands Radio Phil conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. (BIS SACD 1543). It's the best-recorded CD I own. Honestly, it's fucking incredible the range they get out of it. It's the sort of CD I wish I had a properly top-of-the-range-stereo for. And it's recorded DDD. I really think it's a very old-world attitude that says that analogue recording is the best. If digital is good enough for the classical world - and these are the people who can often perceive intervals smaller than 1/128th of a tone, just to give you an idea of their ear-capacity - I think it's probably good enough for some goit with a guitar.
OT, In case anyone's interested in their hearing,
this is a test to find out how good your pitch perception is, and there's links to other tests. I got 0.4875 Hz as my final score. There are other tests for other musically related things as well.
I only really mention this because I sort of sympathise with people saying it doesn't
really matter; except to say that Death Magnetic is one of the most shocking examples of a record sounding like a pile of shit. Herr Park's mentioning noise reminds me of when I used to work in an office where we could listen to music. I listened to Merzbow's 1930 at a fairly loud volume; I followed that with Avril Lavigne's second, and it was unbearably loud. 'Noise' is sort of a misnomer, in a sense, because Merzbow is quite keen on keeping his huge dynamic range, while most major labels bands are habitually obliterating that.