Applying Nyquist theorem to digital vs. analog audio quality I had a recent conversation with a friend about analog vs. digital recordings.  He shared his opinion that music recorded by analog techniques is of superior sound quality to music recorded by digital techniques.  His reasoning was that whenever music is turned into digital, not all of the information is captured, and thus, some of the music is lost.

I was not too sure about his statements as I recently took a DSP course and learned a bit about the Nyquist-Shannon theorem.  As human hearing is typically in the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, I was under the impression that the common sampling rate of 44.1 kHz should be enough to capture all information that is needed to reproduce the sounds that we can hear.  Therefore, I thought that differences between music reproduced from digital and analog should unnoticeable to human ears.

Who is correct?  If anyone, could shed some light on this and clear up any misunderstandings, I would greatly appreciate it.  Thank you very much.

By the way, I am new to Stack Exchange, and I have already tried to find similar questions but to no avail.  Hopefully, this is not a repost.
The Nyquist-Shannon reconstruction theorem applies to perfectly bandlimited signals and perfectly flat reconstruction filters.  Unfortunately, neither exists in the real world.  Nor do digital system that use an infinite number of bits per sample to avoid quantization noise.

The headroom allowed by using higher sample rates than 44.1k may allow a closer approximation (for the bandlimit and reconstruction filter response) to the required perfection.  So does using more bits than 16 to reduce quantization noise.

But analog recording is also not perfect, as noiseless analog recording media and head amplifiers do not exist (because of the existence of atoms and non-zero K temperatures).

So there can be a trade-off.  Choose your preferred sounding reproduction artifacts(s).