With digital distribution the same could be said about CDs.
 
 Vinyl - artwork is larger.  I think vinyl users are the last of the true audiophiles. I'm sure they have a lot invested for listening.  They are probably not using the $99 turntables.
 
 One of the dangers I feel about digital music is that it sounds cleaner and we listen to it at louder levels. You would be surprised how bad the hearing is of kids from the iPod culture.  When you are around those people who have to share their music with other while listening to their headphones there is potential for long term hearing loss.
 

John T
You definitely can't get vinyl as loud safely. You end up with real physical issues that can make the needle jump out of the groove.
 
I think that and the thing I mentioned above about frequency range are real factors in the appeal of vinyl.
 
The fact is, in terms of accuracy, vinyl is a pretty terrible medium.
 
However, in terms of the limitations and compromises it forces upon you, you often end up with something more agreeable to the ear by default. Everything up at 17khz and beyond is actually pretty unpleasant. Super-heavy compression is pretty unpleasant. And those things are hard to do on vinyl.
 
CDs and mp3s don't inherently sound worse. In fact, by all measurable metrics, they're clearly superior formats. But people do some horrible things within those formats that just aren't possible on vinyl.

 There is an article one time on Rolling Stone mentioning that most music coming out of the corporate studios are mixed more in favor of portable devices.  BTW compressed digital formats sound horrible loud on a stereo system. The average person is no longer concerned with high fidelity.  They want to hear their trunk and quarter panels rumble or the person next to you at a stoplight has their music up where the speakers distort enough to make you miss the days of AM radio.

kitekrazy

John T
You definitely can't get vinyl as loud safely. You end up with real physical issues that can make the needle jump out of the groove.
 
I think that and the thing I mentioned above about frequency range are real factors in the appeal of vinyl.
 
The fact is, in terms of accuracy, vinyl is a pretty terrible medium.
 
However, in terms of the limitations and compromises it forces upon you, you often end up with something more agreeable to the ear by default. Everything up at 17khz and beyond is actually pretty unpleasant. Super-heavy compression is pretty unpleasant. And those things are hard to do on vinyl.
 
CDs and mp3s don't inherently sound worse. In fact, by all measurable metrics, they're clearly superior formats. But people do some horrible things within those formats that just aren't possible on vinyl.

 There is an article one time on Rolling Stone mentioning that most music coming out of the corporate studios are mixed more in favor of portable devices.  BTW compressed digital formats sound horrible loud on a stereo system. The average person is no longer concerned with high fidelity.  They want to hear their trunk and quarter panels rumble or the person next to you at a stoplight has their music up where the speakers distort enough to make you miss the days of AM radio.

I don't believe that the vast majority of listeners have ever cared much about Hi Fi.  Its always been just a relative few that were/are interested in high quality sound. First the gear is not cheap and then how many have the ears for it anyway? It isn't exposure to it either. Musicians have an edge because they in general want what they do to sound good. However, many don't care either.
 
 

I like the vinyl era more too, back then you bought a record came home, sat down and listened to it....doing nothing but listening to the music.
so probably then, we enjoyed it more
technically some vinyl fans say an analog vinyl audio quality can be better than a CD because vinyl can be reproduced from an analog studio recording directly without converters that would be needed for a CD.
 

Nowadays there might be machines that press vinyl better than back then.
maybe now vinyl can sometimes give a better audio quality than CD, an 80s analog recording can be pressed onto vinyl directly as for the CD the analog master tape first has to go through Digital/Analog converters.
but vinyl is limited to the amount of music, a 1 hour vinyl loud dancerecord with lots of bass fe would not be possible.
just sharing what I read on the web...
 

 I don't miss spending money on cleaning solutions and anti static stuff. 5 years ago I found a large bottle of Discwasher in the closet. I probably bought that in the early 80's.
 
 One of my Summer projects was to convert LPs to wavs.  If you want them to really sound clean it was very time consuming and had to be done in an audio editor like Soundforge. 
 
 I guess one totally into vinyl would invest in a laser turntable. 
 http://www.elpj.com/  Only $15000.
 
 There is plenty of stuff out there that hasn't made it to CD.

Just for the record... the vinyl I bought and played and sold years ago have never come back.
 

I don't miss the hassle and noise of vinyl... but... 10 years ago I invested in DVD-Audio and SACD. The sound quality if far superior to CD. Last year I saw that HD Tracks and others have started to sell downloads of Hires Flack files. I also started converting a lot of albums into 96k/24bit. No... I can barely stomach listening to CDs and worse. Maybe in the car but even there I have a FIIO X3 portable player and wow... what a beautiful difference. Because of that I started thinking of reasons why... is it the higher frequencies? Something about > 20kHz as we have been led to believe? No, it really is how accurately any format reproduces the audio we can hear and CDs really do fail here. I will gladly explain it if anyone is interested. It became painfully obvious that we have been fooled for the last 30 years. CDs are just not good at representing higher frequencies. My guess is anything > 11k.... maybe lower. There just aren't enough samples to handle multiple frequencies above 11k.
 
My 2 cents

The "vinyl versus digital" discussion, like many in life, comes down to whether you want to be happy or right.  Whatever format you're listening to the evaluation should be "am I enjoying this musical performance here and now?"  If the answer is "yes" and that makes you happy then you're also right!

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