Oh boy you made me bust out the desktop and keyboard for this one

Yes, perfectly pressed vinyl can sound fantastic on very hq hifi. But it will crack. It will hiss. It will degrade each time you play the record.... It’s physics. You can’t deny it.

I mentioned this in my parent comment. The medium will respond to the environment that you listen to it in. For many, that connects you to the music. This has long since been acknowledged as a feature of analog media, not a shortcoming. Digital media comes with a sense of imposition, authority, that's off-putting to people who have relationships with their music.

(super) cd player will at the very least sound equally good... It will always sound cleaner.

I'm going to strongly disagree with this and say that you weren't around in the early 90s when all the classics were getting "Digitally Remastered" (butchered) for the first time, when producers were pushing every band as high as they could get away with because "louder is better." It was hell with tracks peaking with distortion from disrespectful engineers. You even mention the Loudness War in your comment. How you can know about that and still conclude that CD is the universally superior format makes no sense to me. That goes back to my above point that music sounds best in the format it was mastered for. That format isn't always CD.

We like stuff that creeks. We, people, like things which seem to “live”. It makes it easier to relate too... the pops and hisses make it sound more authentic, more alive. And this is where science goes of the rails and feelings take over. Its a slippery slope.

I touched touched on this in another reply, I won't repeat myself but I'll say that your idea that science says that there's a best way to listen to music is ridiculous. There never has been a scientific way to measure how good music is and there never will be. You can measure bitrates, fiedlity, all you want, but the best way for art to exist will never have a universal answer. I assume you think oil on canvas painting is a waste of time because MS Paint exists?

He swears he misses something. I don’t. I look at the science and see better numbers for cds.

I'm just going to turn this around on you and leave it at that. You see better numbers, you think it's better. I see a format that builds a relationship between the medium and user in a way that the other does, I think it's better.