Vinyl Rules !
I still have about 800 LPs, having sold off about 500 a few years ago when I was short on cash. My collection is about equally divided between rock and jazz, dating mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, with 20% "other" which is mostly old blues and modern classical dating from the 1930s-1980s.
I collected vinyl regularly from about 1967 until about 1990, and the prime period for vinyl-buying was the late 1980s when everybody was ditching vinyl to buy "replacements" on CD.
Here is the way I figure it:
All musical instruments, including the human voice, are analog devices.
Sound waves are analog phenomena, traveling as compression and rarefaction through air.
Ears are analog receiving devices, what with pressure pushing on the eardrum, moving tiny parts, etc.
I don't see any digital component in the process described above.
Vinyl is pure warm natural sound. I will gladly listen to surface noise in order to get the overtones. I just wish my poor old ears were as good as they used to be.
And no, I do not have all-tube amplification, but that is my goal.
PS - I have a semi-professional sound card and my stereo is hooked to my computer, so I can rip vinyl as I listen to it. If something is really important to me, I rip it to .WAV as well as .MP3 and I have over 1TB of .WAVs and about 250GB of .MP3s at this point.
