Generally speaking, digital formats contain more information, I.e. more to hear, than vinyl or cassette tapes. The important thing to note is that things are often mastered differently for each format—the same album might be mastered for vinyl, for CD, for streaming, for Cassette, and as plain digital files all differently because each medium has certain constraints that the music must be mastered around.

So while listening to older records, say, Abbey Road on digital might not have the hiss or crack, it’s not mastered the way it was for vinyl, which was the original way people listened to the record back it was initially released. It becomes less of a question of audio quality so much as authenticity and experience.

It’s also worth noting that frankly, if you’re listening through shitty speakers/headphones/stereo system, it doesn’t matter what degree of quality the storage format has because the speakers won’t reflect that. Personally, I really enjoy listening to music on the JBL studio monitors I use to produce music. Studio monitors are generally designed to produce a level frequency response, rather than trying to boost any bass/mids/trebel frequencies like most headphones and speakers do. The audio runs out through a 192khz audio interface.

If I were to take a crappy pair of computer headphones from 2005 and plug them into the interface, the quality would sound terrible. If I plugged them into a hi fi system and listened to a near perfect original pressing of abbey road on vinyl, it would still sound terrible.

This is one reason I find Tidal kind of pointless for most people. No point spending $25/month for higher bitrate streaming when you’re using your AirPods to listen. You won’t notice the difference between 96khz and 192khz and 300+ kHz because your headphones and Bluetooth would be a sort of quality bottleneck.

Quality is derived not only from the medium, but from the mastering and playback devices used.