The earliest CD presentations were very tinny. The AAD discs being the worst of the bunch.
Over time though they have got a lot better. A good well looked after DDD set should sound perfectly good and be better than even a pristine vinyl recording.
What people tend to mean when they compare the sounds isn’t so much the recording but the manner by which those recordings are played back.
Speaker tech is becoming more and more amazing but around the eighties and nineties when CD first came along you needed really well engineered speakers to get the best out of records.
Along with the speakers you had the warmth and clarity of valves. If you are used to playing a tune on vinyl through a really good amplifier and then put a CD or an MP3 player through generic equipment you will feel the earlier technology as being a richer experience. But if you were to get the equivalent equipment now and play a modern recording through it you’d have to be blinded by nostalgia to honestly say the high end of the past sounded better than the high end of the present.
The quality of modern music however is another story for another day.
I disagree about the value of culture during a post flare apocalypse though. If you are fighting for tinned peas you will need Tina Turner and if the internal circuits of your iSplode are dead you will be thankful for a wind up gramophone. Trust me. I’ve seen your future.