Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
The big album art was/is the biggest draw for me anyway. I'm not an audiophile and streaming sounds good enough for my ears but a 1x1 inch album cover on my iPhone can't hold a candle to the full-sized album art in all its glory.
Of course I wish they were more affordable, but in some ways the fact they're so expensive is almost a blessing because I don't have space to hoard albums like I would if they cost a lot less. If forces me to weigh the options more carefully and think about what I would really enjoy most having in my collection.
I agree the music industry fumbled the trend, that much is obvious. But calling people like me "t-shirt collectors" isn't helpful for the hobby either; music or not, it's a badass art collection and I don't see a problem with approaching it that way.
I've seen it on some of my most favorite music from YouTube. One day, poof, the tracks are gone. YT or the creator decided to pull the music to never be heard again. Nothing exists of the music on the internet anymore. I've ripped them and burned them to CDs, but if I could get them in vinyl, I'd be much happier for the long term safety of the music I love.
Personally, I keep flac audio files on an archive NAS server using ECC RAM and ZFS filesystems plus backups. The open source and lossless nature of flac is appealing as it should not be locked into one proprietary vendor and should never have to undergo any lossy transcoding from one format to another. I'm sure my system is imperfect as all things are, but I'm satisfied.
I do also have a very small selection of vinyl records as I can appreciate them for the reasons I mentioned above.
It’s strange to see $30-40 records when digital versions are $10-15.
I liked buying albums because they were a totem and they included mp3 downloads. Or some even had high resolution flac download (Peter Gabriel was good about this).
But the last few didn’t include digital downloads so I had to pirate the digital version.
I used to buy a lot of CDs- I think I had 1000+- but the industry just kind of turned me off by suing customers and whatnot.
I thought maybe they had learned their lesson, but they still seem like rent seekers sitting on top of artists.
As always (like in 2000) there are artists selling directly that are pretty cool. But it’s hard to go to a record store and spend $100 to come away with three records.
Hasn't this been true since people started listening to the radio instead of buying sheet music? Who can be surprised at the cluelessness and intransigence of the music industry after 100+ years of the same? They were so busy fighting digital music, seemingly with the ridiculous pretense they could stop it altogether, they let spotify come in and take a big piece of the pie they could have kept for themselves.
> (1) You add manufacturing capacity aggressively—to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth.
The fact that the author is suggesting the music industry add vinyl manufacturing capacity aggressively is enough to make me question his competence as a business adviser. If my CEO was listening to this person, I would show them a copy of this article and recommend they stop.
Is there much legacy vinyl manufacturing capacity around? I'd have thought they'd need some capital to set up new factories. Although admittedly not billions of dollars.
Given the article says only 50% of vinyl buyers even have record players, this ain't exactly a business on stable foundations IMHO.
The lathe they mention, Lathe Atom A-101, seems to go second-hand for around £2500. At least judging from the first few results. This feels a bit expensive for a home hobbyist. I also wouldn't want to navigate the laws of trying to sell vinyl to people who wanted some pressed from songs they don't have rights to (in order to make some money back).
BUT. Vinyl is not just the audio experience. Its the tangible artifact: the artwork, supporting information, a physical place in a music library etc. For a period CD's/DVD's provided a limited emulation of those attributes but even those are now deprecated. An mp3 or even worse, a stream is not quite the same, is it.
Maybe what we "need" is a reincarnation of a some sort of LaserDisc [0], with the exactly the same form factor as vinyl but dramatically larger storage (including e.g. videos from band performances or other audiovisual material)
Recently we started a music label called Music Of a People (https://musicofapeople.com). We want to help our artists sell physical records, not digital crapware.
We put fans first. Fans love the liveness and physicality of music. Digital is a poor substitute, but it's good marketing and can help make one's day more enjoyable. Fans do not want DRM. Never have. Never will. They want mp3 files. Original Napster had it right.
We are gonna take this fight all the way to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution when we abolish (c)opywrongs once and for all (https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...)
In the meantime, do you hear the people sing?
This is starting to look like a bubble - people buying things they have no idea what to do with purely because they think they will appreciate in value.
I also like reading physical books but don't like having to deal with shelves full of them, so that is easily outsourced to my County's public library system which I think is top notch.
All that is to say that I do still like having some physical manifestation of media around once in awhile, so a few vinyl records and the odd negative/slide/print are nice to have, but I only keep the greatest of the greatest hits so to speak - the bits that I find really significant.
When I say "a large vinyl collection", I imagine something comparable to Haruki Murakami's one [0]. I neither have the space, nor the time or financial means to collect that amount of vinyl, though I have some collections and albums I'd never exchange with any vinyl.
I prefer a good CD or a very nice FLAC rip played via a nice vintage Hi-Fi over vinyl for casual listening. Vinyl has its very place in the music world, and it should be present, but life (at least mine) has no space to accommodate it as the primary source of music.
[0]: https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murak...
It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags.
I don't think so. I for one buy the vinyls of (new and old) albums I love to listen so much that I can put time aside to solely listen to that album and do nothing else.
Buying vinyls just for buying them is just plain consumerism, and not different than buying things you don't need, or buying just for impressing others.
"Don't worry, the price of CD's will come down," they said. Over the following years, vinyl faded and CD's maintained the same price point.
Perhaps, an optimist might point out, the price of the CD did drop — relative to inflation over those following years. I don't know. But when AOL saw fit to flood our mailboxes with CDs to get online, it was clear that the cost to manufacture the compact disc certainly wasn't a factor in dropping the price of the music CD.
I'm too old fashioned in my understanding of business, capitalism. I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. I assumed therefore that a downloadable eBook would be significantly cheaper than the same "pulp" book from the publisher that had to be manufactured from raw materials, printed, shipped....
What broke my reserve, back when, was the "cheap rack classical CD". They'd churn out cheap "collection" box sets that didn't sell, and then recycle them into $2 to $10 single CD issues for the cheap bin. Some of those were mastered off wire still, I'll swear it.
That is completely reasonable if you own and run your own business.
But most businesses aren't owned by the people running them. The owner doesn't care what happens, they just have $X and want that money to grow a small % every year. The way that's gonna happen is if the business they bought with that money grows a small % every year.
The board, the CEO, the managers, the VPs, they all work to make that % increase happen, whatever it takes. If they can't make it happen, they get fired. If they need to increase prices for that, that's what's going to happen. If they need to milk people, cut corners, move manufacturing overseas, whatever it takes, they will do it. If they don't, someone else will.
The owner's money must grow. And "owner" doesn't have to be some fat cat evil billionaire. It's also the retiree living off their 401K savings. It's the 20-year-old starting their contributions. It's the employee pension fund that is there to protect employees.
P.S. I'm positive none of this is news to you or anyone reading it, but I love talking about this sort of thing.
I'm not saying the quality is better, or that I honestly listen to them that often.
There is still a thrill in pulling out a dance record that was underground in London at the time I bought it. I've got quite a few Dr Rockit, which is Herbert before he became Herbert.
And, I'm hopeful that somehow, someday the experience of playing records will be better than letting my kids drive YouTube music and play the same song over and over. If vinyl saved me from that, it would be worth any price.
Yeah, the tech could be improved I'm sure, but you can also get 24 bit, 192 KHz audio if you want to. It's far easier to produce and to deliver to the end user, even though it's ultimately pointless.
As far as consumer-level listening goes, I think it's fair to declare that audio as a technology is done, and has been completed decades ago. We can far outdo human capabilities on cheap, consumer level hardware, not to speak of what we can do on the high end.
Not practical, takes up space, and not as good as listening to the real thing (either live or digital).
It doesn't cost all that much more to make sure the pressing sounds good when played on good equipment.
That doesn't mean that the appeal of holding a record, reading the cover and liner notes while relaxing to the music, comparing the labels of different eras of the record company (something that's preserved on my Black Sabbath cds though that's a little confusing because I thought they were on Rhino but I haven't checked either), the detail of the art and all of that -doesn't have value, and isn't worthwhile.
Sure -it's totally worthwhile but having lost my record collection 25 years ago I don't feel it's compelling enough to spend all of that money replacing it and giving it the physical space in my home -especially when I have everything I had then and much more either on mp3 or some streaming service or another.
> Vinyl is a gimmick.
I disagree. Because most vinyl listeners (incl. me) doesn't listen it for the sound quality itself. While the sound itself has unique properties, utmost resolution is not one of them.
The biggest draw in listening vinyl is the experience itself. Large album covers printed with intricate detail, the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides. Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself. The atmosphere all it creates and the experience revolving around is driving the vinyl.
> but you can also get 24 bit, 192 KHz audio ... even though it's ultimately pointless.
Yes, and it's not pointless. The higher resolution music shows itself as soundstage, not details. It's as pointless as saying, eyes can see 60FPS at most anyway, so higher frame rates are useless. My set has a turntable, a nice CD player with iPod/USB interface and a BT receiver. The sound quality all of them delivers differ, CD unit being the most detailed, by long shot. However, the input source I'm choosing differs according the time I'm going to spend with the music, not the sound quality.
Sometimes I want some nice music while I'm working, so I play from the CD unit. Sometimes, I'm lazy and need some background music, and I open Spotify and stream via BT, but if I have the time and need time for myself with some nice music, it's always vinyls I reach for.
Reducing music, listening and being an audiophile to numbers and formulae is great disservice to all. One may not like or prefer vinyl, this is OK, but calling it a gimmick, ah no.
> I disagree. Because most vinyl listeners (incl. me) doesn't listen it for the sound quality itself.
> The biggest draw in listening vinyl is the experience itself. Large album covers printed with intricate detail, the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides. Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself. The atmosphere all it creates and the experience revolving around is driving the vinyl.
You said you disagreed, but then you described a gimmick.
The only part of what you described that wouldn't work just as well on a CD is changing sides. In fact, they're all things that people actually did with CDs, because CDs were superior to records in every conceivable way, but people still wanted to spend time with their friends. There's nothing about a record that makes you more likely to listen to it with your friends. There's nothing about a CD that says you can't fit it into a pocket in a much larger display envelope.
If you think the ritual of sitting quietly and listening to music is dead, that's because people stopped wanting to do it, not because they stopped buying their music on records.
No, I don't think it's dead, and if it's dead, it's not because vinyl is not the dominant format anymore. It's just a catalyst for me, for that atmosphere.
> You said you disagreed, but then you described a gimmick.
As I described elsewhere, vinyl has a unique function for me, and friends I have. So it's not a gimmick, in my book.
> There's nothing about a record that makes you more likely to listen to it with your friends. There's nothing about a CD that says you can't fit it into a pocket in a much larger display envelope.
Some people dig the sound dynamics of the former strongly (which is not me, btw), and I have never seen the latter one.
I can argue all day everyday about how CDs can accommodate much better sound but record labels and the strive for reducing studio costs ruin the format by stone-wall normalizing these things in the name of loudness, and how analog sound paths sound warmer, and you don't need resolution to love some audio, but I have no time for that, at least today. Let's only say that I'm an ex-orchestra player who's listening to both vinyls and CDs for more than 30 years, and know some stuff about sound.
I think that statement supports the grandparent post saying that vinyl is a gimmick.
Having the same friends over with music playing over different mediums never resulted in the same vivid atmosphere for us.
Maybe this is because of us, but vinyl definitely has its own irreplaceable function for me and us (as friends), no it's not a gimmick.
That's kind of the thing, and why record companies have no need to please the author of this article -- developing better tech would be pointless. People are into it for the experience/nostalgia, not for the sound quality.
> Yes, and it's not pointless. The higher resolution music shows itself as soundstage, not details. It's as pointless as saying, eyes can see 60FPS at most anyway, so higher frame rates are useless.
Bit depth manifests as dynamic range. Unless you need to reproduce accurately a recording that both contains the faintest buzzing mosquito, and a jackhammer right next to your ear, it's got plenty dynamic range for anyone's listening needs. Having more is useful for audio editing, not because it sounds better.
Low bit depth audio just sounds noisy, otherwise it's understandable just fine. I think the early Game Boy Pokemon games had 1 bit audio for the cries.
High frequencies are IMO mostly pointless for anyone with the money to spend on audio hardware. We have the best hearing as children, so unless you're a wealthy 12 year old you probably won't benefit from anything above 20 KHz. I've had my hearing tested and they don't even bother going much higher than somewhere around 12 KHz which I already perceive very, very faintly.
Sure, Bluetooth audio can be noticeably bad, but that's because Bluetooth just wasn't made for that and it was shoehorned in later.
There's also a difference between still being able to hear a single pure tone, and being able to discern the presence or lack of high frequencies in a more complex bit of noise.
You can be the most pristine kid in the world and you are still better off without excessively high frequencies.
just distribute CDs in vinyl-size containers
>the manual effort you give to cue in the vinyl and changing sides
this only happens if you also go with old school vinyl players and not the automated ones. also, lifting an arm to compensate for the lack of technology is not what I'd consider a meaningful experience
>Adding coffee, tea, a book or a couple of friends into the music itself
a vinyl is not a live concert, there is nothing in the tech that intrinsically lends itself more to those situations. I can have friends listen to a CD, I can drink a coffee or read a book listening a CD.
>It's as pointless as saying, eyes can see 60FPS at most anyway, so higher frame rates are useless.
We know how many frequencies our ears can perceive, and the Sampling Theorem doesn't lie
>Reducing music, listening and being an audiophile to numbers and formulae is great disservice to all.
vinyls only exist because of maths and physics, analog stuff is not voodoo magic. listening to a CD while forgetting the technical specifications is exactly the same as listening to the vinyl. as long as I know the CD is a >44.1KHz and was recorded and mixed properly by competent audio engineers I don't see how it could be any more "reductionist" than making sure your vinyls also were well recorded
Well it’s objectively a gimmick. You get poor quality and sometimes a better mastering which you could and should have on the digital file anyway. At this point what vinyl has for it is the “joy” of moving a large disc of plastic and a player arm. You are selling the format by the one minute of theatric at the beginning of a listening session. At this point, I’m personally convinced from what I have seen that most of the people who listen to vinyl do it for the snobbish pleasure of being vinyl listeners.
Well, I started listening music with open reel tapes, cassette players, vinyl and CD at the same time. So, vinyl is not something I discovered recently.
I'm pretty sure bayindirh wants to do exactly that. Whether it breaks their immersion, or even what immersion means to them, is completely subjective. For them, it's intentionally tactile.
This lack fundamentally makes vinyl an existentially (as in Sartre) different listening experience.
Hogwash that doesn’t stand up to A-B testing. What does “soundstage” even mean in this context? Soundstage at least as commonly used is going to be overwhelmingly controlled by speaker design, placement and room acoustics (something that “audiophiles” tend to ignore - it is both the least sexiest and yet most important issue).
Of course if someone tells you are listening to a 192 kHz recording you are likely to perceive it as better - humans are very prone to suggestibility.
Once you are over 35 you’ll also find out that your high frequency perception rapidly drops off a cliff as you age and sample rates at <30kHz are more than enough. It’s a bit sad when you realize you’re no longer bothered by coil wine in the 10s of KHz.
Soundstage means the size of the stage you can envision and the distance between instruments you can place them in your mind while you're listening the sound source your eyes closed. It's best envisioned with nicely mastered albums, and good recordings of symphony orchestras.
Considering you mic a 100-person orchestra from above with 8-10 mics, via a nice digital and lossless path, you can create the same vision of size in your mind just with two, reasonably priced, high resolution bookshelf speakers (Heco Celan GT302, or even Creative GigaWorks T20/T40 works well), run via a half-decent full resolution AB amplifier.
As you introduce lossy algorithms and increase compression, the high-frequency hints start to get clipped, and the sense of atmosphere transforms to a smaller, flatter room. It doesn't sound bad per se, but if you know how the original sounds, you can say something is amiss.
You don't need $10K systems to experience this. Just a good amp, a pair of good speakers, and a well mastered album. That's all.
The shallower dynamic range of vinyl means you must mix much more conservatively, you cant make as loud, you cant transition from quiet to loud as quickly, your high and low levels must be closer together.
Those limitations however, perhaps surprisingly, can actually can make for a better sounding mix.
However a lossless digital format will always exceed vinyl in every technical characteristic, however because of quantization it may not sound quite as good, particularly if the entire recording chain was analog.
That all said, an mix intended for vinyl may indeed sound better than one intended for digital, because the inherent limits of vinyl produce mixes that sound more 'natural' to people, albeit one that is not strictly transparent.
My initial comment about wider soundstage was for 24bit/192KHz and above sound carriers, carrying lossless audio from the source, not for vinyls. :)
I listen vinyl not for the detail it provides.
The only time I ever want a very high dynamic range is when I'm listening to orchestral music. Otherwise for casual listening, I prefer the quieter mix of an album intended for vinyl.
In reality that's not a thing that actually happens. This stair step visualization is an abstraction that is used to illustrate sampling theorem. The reality is that digital wave forms replicate as perfectly smooth waves when they are converted back to an analog signal, as demonstrated here: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
That said, I agree with all of your other points.
You completely ignore everything relevant stated about the psychoacoustic performance of adults.
> high-frequency hints
Unless you’re 10 years old I’ll assume the upper frequency range of your hearing is no more than 22 kHz and that is pushing it. Hearing above 16 kHz becomes heavily attenuated in adulthood.
When people talk high frequency they really mean stuff in the 2 to 6 kHz range.
In any event 48 kHz sampling for reproduction/storage is beyond plenty.
> Just a good amp, a pair of good speakers, and a well mastered album. That's all.
And ignore room acoustics.. sure that doesn’t sell speakers and amps. It’s much easier to say use this expensive power cord which has no effect on anything then make people have to think about engineering.
Some people will describe higher bitrate, higher sampling rate sound to be smoother, even if they can’t tell what is the difference. Similarly, some people will describe same higher bandwidth signal to be more airy or open. Hearing tests do not quantify these details.
A solid example is Foo Fighters’ album, Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, and doesn’t fatigue the ears. Maybe you can point a difference with a spectrogram, but the difference can be highlighted by your ears and brain in much more detailed manner.
Another example is how people listen to higher bandwidth music. People are more engaged with higher quality, higher bandwidth sound. They concentrate for longer periods and listen more intently. Again, the brain can notice something or hearing tests can’t quantify.
Lastly, people find images taken by cameras with Foveon sensors more appealing from color perspective, because the color resolution is much higher. While Bayer sensors’ color reproduction is both true and high resolution, brain can detect higher color resolution with ease.
All senses are trained on real world over the decades, and know how to distinguish between real and fake. So, it’s no surprise that brain can detect things which we can’t put our finger on squarely.
My rooms are not acoustically special. They are pretty standard, if not mundane. The equipment I use is high end, vintage stuff; but they are not exotics. Cabling is done per manuals of components.
The only power conditioning I have is a surge protector which claims to have line noise filtering, but this is not why I got it.
However, all the qualities I discussed here is audible on that set. The interesting part is, I’m using the same set for 30 years, and I know its sound character like my name. I can hear the same details and get the same atmosphere when I listen to the same albums (mostly CDs), so brain can reconstruct something we can’t describe from how sound interacts with both air and our ears.
Lastly, I can still easily hear switch mode power supply noise, without even trying.
Non sequitur. These harmonics of interest are still all below 24 kHz.
> Hearing tests do not quantify these details.
A-B testing doesn’t have to quantify anything to prove that these differences are imperceptible and you are mainly cueing off suggestion. 24/192 might make you feel better and that is fine, but someone could switch it surreptitiously and you would quite likely never know the difference.
I’ve heard all the dumb bullshit why A-B testing doesn’t work (ironically often from idiots that will also proclaim to “trust the science” on popular topics including everything from COVID vaccines, medicine and global warming - but they will reject straightforward scientific experimentation). Somehow when their sacred ox of golden ears is gored, science is useless.
> Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen,
Nobody claimed there’s no differences in recording and mastering - but that these differences exist well within the typical limits of human hearing - far below 24 kHz and far far above the noise floor. This is especially the case if you can hear it on vinyl since the SNR of vinyl is a joke compared to 16 bit reproduction - it’s more like 10-11 bits - this is a fundamental limitation of the medium.
Maybe someone else can take that information and learn something, but I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll sway you from your woo of course.
It's much simpler than that - it's not likely to be "on-grid."
Modern music is tracked and mixed in a DAW (digital audio workstation). In that DAW you specify the BPM. Artists and producers work hard to keep the music exactly in that BPM. The result is the music sounds dead and lifeless - it can't "breathe." They even have tools that can take performances that were tracked and align them to the beat (they do this for guitars, drums, pretty much everything).
Rick Beato did a video on this subject and chose Led Zeppelin and remastered some tracks to align to the grid and played the result. It went from sounding good to sounding awful. Here's a link - https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU.
Note - there's nothing wrong with digital recording and playback. They're great, in fact they're better than anything we've ever had. The problem is computers make it tempting to make everything "perfect" and it's the pursuit of this perfection that's destroying the soul of music.
It's like the difference between a kindle, a book, and your grandfather's copy of the same book. Three very different experiences, without fidelity being part of the question at all.
As a result, most vinyls have better dynamic range than stone-wall mastered CDs and digital releases, and this is one of the reasons why vinyls sound the way they are.
It's a bit of an ironic use of a technical limitation of vinyl. Its dynamic range is lower, and it doesn't allow doing what digital can, so it's been spared of this particular sin.
Still, properly mastered digital will be even better.
There are plenty of vinyl releases where they just dumped the Spotify mp3 on the plate.
One significant difference is that vinyl recordings are de-essed, because the medium has trouble dealing with high-slope sounds such as loud white noise.
Distortion from slope-limiting is actually more pleasant to the ear than say hard clipping, but sometimes you really don't want to have it at all.
It’s what makes/keeps music a tangible social object: when you discuss it, you can have it in your hands. That’s what makes the listening experience more complete, more memorable.
Digital audio has the huge advantage to allow for more than only stereo - but that’s only relevant for the people or places that can afford to have a surround system. But you can’t see it, you can’t touch it.
Many people have a surround system at home for movies/TV but full multi-channel audio never really took off, not even in the entirely digital world of online music where it is relatively easy.
You should be able to have a similar experience with your digital collection. I wish I could flick through covers in my library rather than browse a grid.
Nothing wrong with that, they get to make a bit more money and the fans get what they want. It kind of explains the high price.
My mp3 collection from 2001 still works just fine. I'm not getting your point.
Listening to an EDM track on vinyl vs Spotify is an entirely different experience.
Could you 100% perfectly reproduce this experience the way that I subjectively prefer via the medium of 192/24 digital mastery? Sure. But, no one does this.
I digitized my entire CD collection in the late '90s. I had an argument with one of my high school teachers in the '90s who was operating under the delusion that vinyl sounds better than digital because digital 'steps' up/down and vinyl (being analog) perfectly smoothly--you know the BS argument. I upgraded my car's CD player to one that could play data CDs filled with MP3s in the early 2000s. I had an MP3 player before the iPod made it cool.
But I found that I drifted away from music. I got in my car and it would play random songs. I put my headset on at work and hit play and it would play random songs. I never really thought about the music and one day at work I just didn't put my headphones on. I was driving and traffic was being quite peculiar, so I turned the music off to concentrate on what the fuck was happening on the road. And I never turned it back on. I stopped listening to music for probably 5 years.
At some point my parents moved and something got fucked up in the shuffle. I ended up with a box full of my dad's old records. I bought a record player for shits and giggles and to appease my inner hipster. And you know what, I like it. I like the mandate that I choose what to listen to next. I like the ritual, the physical process of removing a record from its sleeve, putting it on the turntable, picking up the arm thing and putting it on the record. I like the fact that it makes me stand my fat ass up every 20 minutes and walk over and flip the record or pick a new one to listen to.
You talk about the convenience of digital, and you're right. Digital is a lot more convenient than vinyl. But that's a bug, not a feature. Music isn't just about audio. There's a whole lot of the human experience wrapped up in it, and for me personally, the ... cumbersomeness of vinyl keeps me connected to it in a way that I lost with digital music.
Part of why I enjoy vinyl records is the act of restoring, optimizing, and otherwise fiddling with old turntables. I find interacting with the physical machines enjoyable, and it's neat to hear the results.
You aren't the arbiter of what other people enjoy, and it's weird to try and police the "correct" way to do something subjective like listening to music.
And visioconf if more efficient than walking your ass to the local bar to catch up with your best friend yet you'll still do that every single time you can because it's infinitely more enjoyable.
People should stop living under the impression that everything in life should be made faster/cheaper/more accurate, and that cheaper/faster/more accurate things are inherently better because the numbers written on them are higher than the numbers written on the previous iterations. Life isn't a problem for which you have to automate and solve every single part of, otherwise the most efficient way to go through life would be in a matrix style coma pod
I'll go one further; vinyl (revival) is mostly a scam.
Sound quality from CD is unarguably "better": https://www.vox.com/2014/4/19/5626058/vinyls-great-but-its-n...
"Better" in quotes, because what constitutes better for you is subjective. It is however objectively true that the fidelity of CDs is more accurate than vinyl.
Now having said that, you might prefer the sound of vinyl, or just the physical properties for playback, over CDs. That's all fine, and I sincerely hope you enjoy yourself. What gets my goat though, is this nonsense people are falling for regarding superior sound quality.
Buy CDs, rip them to FLAC, and you have both physical media (which I love), and also the convenience of digital copy.
We can, but we don't.
Streaming is still crap quality, majority of music devices are still crap quality, DAB+ radio is still crap quality.
If I wanted audiophile quality I'd buy a FLAC download instead.
I am nostalgic. I want vinyl. The old guy music I used to listen to isn’t available.
Therefore the record labels are lazy and greedy. Here are some cherry-picked market statistics from other self-interested parties presented with no context.
See? I am right.