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I do miss album art. But I have to disagree with the notion that it's laziness that prevents artists from creating album art for CDs. The cost of printing has increased (just price the difference between a single sided CD cover vs. a booklet) and the benefit of album art is diminished by the size of the CD insert. Plus, most artists couple a CD release with a complete website redesign anyway -- if they were really smart they'd allow people to download the equivalent of album art. I'm sure some bands do that now anyway.
As for the sound quality debate: Yes, some things sound better on vinyl and some things sound better on CD. The process of recording music for the two mediums is very different.
CDs do allow for a much, much higher dynamic range. You can get really loud booming bass and screeching highs. In the old days those loud passages could cause the needle to skip on a record. But it's not just the loudness that you get with CDs, you can have a very soft passage in music that doesn't get buried under the sound of scratches and dust.
The problem with CDs is the same problem with any digital medium: bits. Digital recordings aren't "smooth"; they have edges which you can actually hear in very soft passages (such as during a fade out). It's sort of like a low-res JPG where you can see "blocks" in the images. This can also show up in the louder passages as a shrill feel (a lot of people call it "cold").
The loudness war is another problem ... just because you CAN make a CD very loud, doesn't mean you should. When Roachboy was talking about compression he wasn't talking about MP3 compression (which is file size compression). He was talking about compressing the music so that the soft parts are just as loud as the loud parts. It's a little hard to explain.
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