Remember that the "flat and lifeless" digital experience that Fremer was talking about was a long time ago.. Yeah, he's a bit of a nut, and I'm sure that some of what he hears is as much psychological as physical (especially as it regards such things as power cords _sans_ isolating filters and so forth), but the man has a point where digital is concerned. Or rather, as far as digital _was_ concerned.
Remember the old days? When the digital recording involved brick-wall filtering of the analog source at 20KHz before digital sampling? I sure do. Sure, the clicks and pops were gone, but the filter introduced such distortion as to make the music nearly unlistenable for anyone who could hear anything over about 16KHz. High harmonics were so far out of phase with the fundamental that anything that has a percussive component (piano, xylophone, cymbals, etc.) would hurt my teeth. We've gotten past that problem with higher sampling rates during the recording phase, and digital processing can reduce the bitrate without inducing those phase errors.
Redbook CD still has one major problem, though. Nyquist says that a 2F+k (where k is some small value) sampling rate is sufficient to encode an analog waveform unambiguously. For audio, that means that the 22.1KHz rate that CDs use for each channel ought to be enough. And it would be, but for the fact that there is a hidden encoding in stereo audio, and that encoding is the temporal difference between the signal's arrival at each of our two ears (or our two microphones, as the case may be). While no component of the audio signal may exceed 20KHz, proper spatial encoding may require a temporal resolution that requires the sampling rate capable of resolving a difference in arrival times of less than 50us. And yes, I understand that that's getting really finicky, and that the phase errors in most output transducers (speakers) will be greater than that, but the best equipment can _just_ make the difference perceptible. And for smaller ensembles (chamber music, acoustic jazz, folk, and that sort of thing), that spatial accuracy can take the listening experience to a level most people are completely incapable of imagining.
SACD and DVD-A solve the fundamental problems of Redbook, but they came to the game just a little too late. People had already decided to settle for cassettes again. Not literally, mind you -- today's cassette is the MP3 file. Even at the highest bitrates (256 or 320Kbps), MP3s are audibly inferior even to Redbook, but damn they're handy, eh? They are Good Enough(TM) for most people, and you can carry a half a billion of the things on something smaller than the crappy pocket transistor radios we had when I was a kid.
The upshot is that now that we can readily and cheaply produce recordings that are light years beyond anything anybody dreamed of in the '60s, the mass market that would have supported it has become irrevokably attached to yet another great leap backwards. That's really a pity.