Hi Nowave,
Yes, you are right. All the older co-op apartment buildings in New York, including my own, have a servant's entrance. Typically it opens from the kitchen into a back stairwell.
CD is a more linear medium (no roll-off in high-frequency response) so it exposes aberrations in microphones, errors in EQ or engineering. High frequencies on many LPs are usually 3 dB or more suppressed, so they are more forgiving of sibilant recordings.
That said, I have some older pop/rock (and classical) LPs in my collection that are sibilant. If those master tapes to are reissued on CD without being remastered, they can be truly awful.
Overall, analog tape recording and vinyl technology is more forgiving and less revealing of high-frequency screw-ups. There are technical reasons as well. Tapes can saturate with too much high-frequency signal and when the LPs are cut with exaggerated highs, a lot of cartridges wouldn't track the high-frequency grooves without disortion. This increases towards the center of the record, where the hi-frequency groove modulations are closer together ("pinch" distortion), hence the stylus has trouble negotiating the violent twists and turns of the groove. One of the older tests for tracking ability of phono cartridges was to play test LPs of high-energy recordings of triangles, bells, cymbals, etc. and listen for the tell-tale signs of the stylus "mistracking"--nasty sounds indeed.
Regards,
