There is a certain ceremony involved with choosing and playing vinyl that cannot be recreated with digital media. That, to me, is the magic. In modern times a full digital setup is going to provide a more "faithful recreation" than anything analog.
Been there. Browsing vinyl involves flipping fore and aft and is very tactile. Browsing tape and CDROM involves running your eyes over them but you can run a finger along them to get another sense involved.
Loading a record is quite the event: slip out of the card sleeve, then slip the dic out of the waxed paper sleeve and pop it on the spindle without scratching it. There is of course the correct way to handle them that if you are around or older than my age (52), you already know - the delicate fingers on the rim and your thumb on the centre.
I can remember my Dad going to the "biggest NAAFI in the world" (Rheindahlen) and coming back with a brand new record player in around 1978 or 79. This thing could handle something like five LPs at once and play them sequentially.
Pissing around with Spotify isn't quite the same and I do understand why people enjoy the theatrics but to be honest: I turned my CDs into FLACs and ditched the tapes a long time ago. I still prefer to buy my music by the CDROM and rip it to FLAC or mp3 or whatever - now that is me showing my age!
I used to just look at the titles on the spines of my records (back when I had them) to decide what to play. I'd look at one and listen to the music in my head for a few minutes before deciding whether to actually put the record on, or else look at the spine of another record and do the same thing. I could spend hours doing that, and by that time I had to go do something else. I got a whole concert with no equipment at all. That's when I decided I wasn't an audiophile.
I have a few songs ripped from CDs over the years that I’ll be very unhappy to lose if iTunes Match ever goes away, since I’ve lost the CDs and as far as I know they simply aren’t online. Such a great service.
If your Apple ID gets accidentally suspended because of a false positive from the "can't turn it off" clientside CP local file scanning that Apple is planning to roll out to all of our devices, you won't get any warning.
There is also some with CDs, but vinyl's the real deal. The record cleaner brush. Inspect the needle for dust. Be sure the record is properly seated. Sit back and enjoy.
I'm not going to say the date but my birthday is exactly 4 months before a certain holiday. So some years back (too many, alas), on this holiday and 4 months after I turned 33, my friends put on a party to celebrate both the holiday and my 33 1/3'rd birthday. Naturally, LP records were played.
Watching the reels spinning at different rates and the tape moving on an intricate path, in a high-end open-reel tape recorder with multiple motors and multiple heads, e.g. a Revox, was even more satisfying.
