Ask Lemmy

So, I am not a vinyl fan, and do not own any. And I agree that the "quality argument" about vinyl being analog and thus being higher fidelity is pretty senseless. But a couple of points:

Vinyl avoided the loudness war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles.

Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war".

Because of the limitations of the vinyl format, the ability to manipulate loudness was also limited. Attempts to achieve extreme loudness could render the medium unplayable. Digital media such as CDs remove these restrictions and as a result, increasing loudness levels have been a more severe issue in the CD era.

I'd guess that audio recorded with the expectation that it would be played on vinyl is probably optimized for that format

Same idea for old headphones or amplifiers or whatever. I don't know specifics.

LCD and LED displays, in 2024, are pretty much across-the-board better than CRTs in 1990. But a lot of old video game emulators try to reproduce artifacts that resulted from low display fidelity of CRTs. Scanlines. Blurriness. Blooming. Curvature of display. Even a bit of color fringing or the like. That's because the game was designed to be played on the system in question (or one closely approximating it). The art very frequently looks better, less jagged.

I have magnificent MIDI soundfonts that can make any MIDI audio played on my computer sound vastly more realistic than it does on old, 1990s computer synth hardware or on something like a Super Nintendo. But the music can sound much worse, because the artists were designing the soundtrack with an eye to making it sound pleasant on hardware that had the characteristics of the time.

Album art

Vinyl records were not very space efficient. But that meant that artists had a huge amount of space to create album artwork compared to CDs.

That's not something that I'm personally into, but some people really are.

Now, all the above being said, I don't own vinyl or a turntable and have no interest in ever getting one. But there are some arguments that I can understand for why people may prefer them.