It's an irrational trend and the end result will be future generations taking huge amounts of plastic to landfill. And that may be sooner than we think: spinning LPs give off carcinogenic gas. Suffer for fashion.
The rotating disk in the room adds atmosphere, and there is a bit of commitment -- I can't easily skip that one song I dislike, so I listen to the album the way the artist made it. Sometimes that is annoying, but quite often, I have ended up enjoying the harder-to-digest songs even more than the others.
I also have access to Amazon’s music service in every room on whatever devices we have. I am working my way through RS’ to 500 albums with it.
I am currently building a Grateful Dead Time Machine (https://www.spertilo.net/) to have that added to the music playing repertoire.
I can listen to all of those as background music or even actively. But they’re different than vinyl for me and I don’t care about what others do or how they do it, but I ENJOY this in a way I never enjoyed music before while having the disposable income to do it.
To each their own and all of that but for folks to deride those who listen to vinyl with a dismissive wave of their hand because they disagree with it and generalize their feelings for those who enjoy it is a bit much.
For me, the soldering was done in 10-15 mins on the GDTM and the new challenge is making the faceplate for the enclosure.
Something nerdy to learn and do. :-)
The funny thing is that most folks who need to tell everyone that listening to records is dumb because they sound bad are almost certainly listening to the vast majority of their music over streaming services. So you have albums that are being mastered to survive MP3 compression being delivered over lossy streams that 100% have not being signed by the artist and don't contain glossy, album-sized photographs and hard copies of the lyrics.
Meanwhile, LPs are legitimately collectable (limited pressings absolutely accumulate value in the same way other collectables do) and are often mastered or remastered for full spectrum fidelity and pressed on extremely heavy vinyl stock. Much of the "sounds bad" critiques are only truly applicable to mass-market pop music LPs that were pressed on thin+cheap material and sacrificed quality to fit more minutes of music per side as a way to keep costs low.
When you buy, for example, an LCD Soundsystem LP and A/B it with the same tracks on Spotify, it quickly becomes clear that maybe we're not so dumb after all.
They are unaware that a) it doesn't and b) Spotify does.
Which is fine, but you'll notice that you rarely see LP collectors expend energy trying to tell streaming music enthusiasts that the entire premise of their enjoyment is flawed.
I'm not actively seeking out digital music listeners to proselytize records. We tend to not do that because they already have a hard time keeping up with existing demand.
You might not like hearing that most music is mastered for lossy compression, but it doesn't change that it's true. I suggest that you don't confuse "better" mastering (subjective) with mastering for a target medium, which is a technical process.
Anyhow, we all know that LPs only get warmer when you play them on a tube amp. Yes, that was also a joke.
I'm also aware that Spotify sounds bad. That might be part of the reason I don't use it?
I think you'd benefit from a world view with more nuance than tribes of enlightened LP buyers versus ignorant Spotify subscribers.
Someone on HN compared Emacs to vinyl the other day, and I really enjoyed the comment. There are multiple reasons why Emacs/vinyl is objectively worse. That being said, it’s fun, and there’s no reason to hate on it.
Your "plastic to landfill" is also irrational because vinyl can be reused easily, and albums are often repurposed into decorative items before discarded entirely.
And they're more valuable and collectable than e.g. CDs, people take care of them, pass them down to generations, or sell them.
I don't think it's a coincidence that things from the same era, like super heroes, are also currently popular.
Nostalgia is a strong drug.
Only in California
My VPI turntable could extract details from vinyl I've never heard elsewhere. Marvelous machine, that.