i would personally prefer a comparison of the same title of vinyl and CD - with the equipment you've chosen.
We had done that as well, the Sheffield Steel CD vs. the vinyl. It was close but the vinyl sounded a little more fluid and natural. Though I would be happy with either of them.
there is something totally unnatural to me with a digital playback whenever i have a chance to compare it with a good analogue.
Given our results from the CD vs. LP and all the similar comments to yours above, this begged the question - was it a limit of the digital playback format and equipment or of the different mastering of CD vs. LP?
So the natural way to test that was to record the vinyl to digital and play it back through the CD players DAC section. The A/D was done via my PreSonus FireBox (not the best A/D but not shabby either).
The result was a digital recording that sounded exactly like the vinyl. So it strengthens my view that 'digital' is not to blame, indeed it records what you put in, its the mastering (and re-mastering) of CDs that is poor and lets them down comapred to vinyl. And god damn those uber compressed masterings we get today.
We did the recording at 96/24 since both A/D and D/A are capable of it but a quite test at 44.1/16 (CD standard) also produced an extremely similar sound to the original vinyl.
I also have to say I am mightily impressed by Robs AT cartridge. It is dead quiet in silent parts, no crackles or pops and the sound is crisp, clean and neutral. Not much of that 'vinyl colouration'!
Oh, and I didn't do any 'processing' to change the sound (well not for the test, we had a bit of fun later on!). Just input from the phono stage, record, and out again.