Vinyl isn’t the limiter in most systems.
There are a couple kore reasons why Vinyl is making a comeback:
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People listen to music differently now, and don’t care much about ultimate sound quality. I think this might be because us older folk grew up,in an era of limited technology for recording and playing music, and so new formats that offered better sound were a big thing. Going from a cassette player to a CD player in your car was a marked improvement. Advertisers sold us on the sound quality improvements, so we cared.
But for young people growing up in the MP3/streaming world, sound quality doesn’t appear to be as important as other factors. Quick access, constant availability, nostalgia all become more important. I suspect music today is much more likely to be used as background to other activities than for people to just sit and enjoy it. -
Vinyl has a tinkerer/hobbyist/collectible aspect to it. Stereophiles and hobbyists used to love vinyl because it gave them endless options for accessories to buy, fodder for debates, fiddly things to clean and maintain, You could have debates over what kind of cartridge to use, whether wow and flutter mattered as much as distortion, how to clean a needle properly, yada yada. lots of hands-on activities like moving tonearms or cleaning needles and records.
Along comes digital, and everything just works well enough and nothing needs constant tuning/resetting/cleaning. For some people, that’s not a feature.
And my speakers are pretty good. So was my turntable (and cartridge, the most important part!) when I had one.
Here’s a guy with a pretty good stereo system. 
Possibly the best stereo system in the world.
And, yes, it has a turntable. He built his own. He acknowledges that it probably wasn’t strictly necessary to build his own, except for his pursuit of perfection, because “there are plenty of good turntables that you can buy for $20,000, $30,000 or $50,000” without having to spend the kind of really serious money that he did on building a one-of-a-kind customized one.
The turntable discussion begins just after 22:00 in the video.
A couple of the comments following the video:
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The damn turntable alone costs more than my entire house
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When the Gods want to listen to music they go to Ken’s place.
Sometimes it all depends on what you are used to.
Many years ago the radio station from university I attended would broadcast “classical music to study by” every evening. And I would listen on a basic radio - with a 4" speaker.
Then I attended the university’s orchestra concerts and found the higher frequencies and other noises terrible. The violins sounded “scratchy”, and other instruments were producing tones I never heard before. It took me a long time and many concerts to get used to the real sound of instruments.
When I had a car with a CD player I went and got a bunch of used CDs for use in the car just because the sound was so vastly superior to the MP3s on my phone.
I cannot help but think that at some point in the future a new music file format for transportable digital music will replace the current one. Storage is bigger now, so let’s get some better sound.
Good point. Surely music tech has also improved in the last decade. However, the obstacle (of there is one) may not be storage but streaming speeds.
It’s not purely a storage size issue. We can concoct really clever new file formats, but for that next-gen sound you still have to physically build some kind of 3d active phased array, or whatever we are imagining.
Such speeds are improving, too, albeit a little behind storage capacity.
Yes sir. I meant to acknowledge this by saying “if there is one” and have learned to dislike auto-correct.
Oh I didn’t think you disagreed.
That said, I suspect that format will lag WAY behind where it should be just out of sheer inertia. Which is, really a shame.
That day is here now. Both Apple and Spotify (and I’m sure others; I only know about the services I use) now have lossless streaming formats available. And Apple now also has some music in multi-channel* Atmos format on top of being lossless. I have an unlimited data plan on my phone, so I’ve set the default to lossless Atmos in Apple Music, the service I use the most.
*if you have certain models of AirPods and I don’t know what else, Atmos gets you spatialized audio, meaning you hear the various instruments in different locations around you, and as you turn your head, you get the effect of moving around in the mix. On some tracks, it’s a gimmick, on some it just sounds poor, but on the best examples, it’s a really cool experience. As I gather, it’s sort of analogous to the shift from mastering for LP to mastering for CD. Takes a while for everyone to learn what does and does not work.
I thought this might be of interest. Basically it appears that demand for vinyl records is exceeding available supply:
Let’s not confuse/compare devices for sound creation with devices for sound reproduction. Personally, I want top notch gear that sounds as neutral as possible so that I can hear what the artist created with their tube amps.
seen this today note the link strip is related to the topic…
Ehhh, to some extent an amplifier is an amplifier. It takes a signal and makes it louder. The ones used for reproduction usually have less preamp gain, because adding heaps of extra distortion isn’t a common goal there. In either case, the tubes are an unnecessary method of doing so. But they do sound different from say, a class D solid state amp.
Latest update:
The headline “Vinyl Outsold CDs for the First Time Since 1987” is rather burying the lead. If we read the linked RIAA report (pdf), we see revenue from physical media went up by 4%, while revenue from streaming media went up by 7%. Being a bigger part of a pie that’s getting smaller is not a path to long-term success.
In other news, horses outsold Model Ts.
I get why some buy vinyl. The nostalgia, retroness, the statement, the flaws having their own appeal, the art on the full size covers …
Why does ANYONE buy a CD now though?