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Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
A record technically has the actual sound waves recorded on it. Anything other format that we have has digital representations of the sound waves on it.
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Yes, but the mechanical nature of vinyl means that the are a huge number of variables that conspire against it. Temperature, vibration, dirt, needle wear, needle wear on the record, inductive losses at the transducer (ie. where the mechanical movement of the needle is translated into electrical currents)
Just because the analog waveform is represented in an analog fashion on vinyl does not mean that you have more resolution than digitally sampled audio:
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24-bit precision gives you about 16.77 million values. Assuming a total groove width of 50 x 10^-6m, the maximum movement of the cutter is physically bounded at about half that. Much more and the cutter will be in the space for an adjacent groove. Thus, 50 microns width divided by 16.77 million gives us about 3 x 10^-12m, i.e. ~0.03 angstroms.
The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 1.0 angstroms (1 x 10^-10m). That would make the resolution of a 24-bit digital signal equivalent to an analog cutter whose resolution is just about 1/30 the width of a hydrogen atom. Sadly, this seems to be physically impossible, as none of the particles smaller than atoms are stable enough to be used in records.
Of course, records aren't made of hydrogen, they're made of the polymer pvc. One molecule of pvc is about 100,000 angstroms. This means that, if the cutters were actually removing single pvc molecules the vinyl records would have about 11 bits of resolution. Sadly, they don't get even that precise, though I'm not sure the actual precision. To get down to a record made of hydrogen atoms (possible under very low temp/very high pressure I suppose) one would need 19 bits. Anything beyond that is useless as long as the laws of physics hold.
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If you like the sound of vinyl, and many do, that's great. But it's not a superior format on technical merit. It's actually a lower sampling rate that is more subject to environmental factors when reading back the waveform, and with no error correction to top it all off.