Quote Originally Posted by Woochifer
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Nowadays, you really have to be dedicated in order to get into vinyl. In a way, it's much more appealing to hobbyists because unlike with digital formats and amplification upgrades, vinyl has so much more variation and ways of working the sound. And unlike with cabling, CD player tweaking, and other sometimes dubious modern day audiophile upgrades, tweaking with a turntable (+cartridge+stylus+tonearm+phono preamp) provides very obvious and often compelling improvements in sound quality. Reasons for getting into vinyl might be something as simple as people wanting better bang for the buck whenever they invest in system upgrades.
Of course, there's the equipment hobbist aspect and there's no accounting for that. And I know about that: recently I bought a couple of used rangefinder film cameras and a few lenses. What was I thinking Fun, but not for serious photography in this day-and-age. After a couple of weeks fooling around I wish I'd put the cash to the much more useful new digital I'd like.

Same thing with vinyl. It can sound good, but it's not were the music is for most people, certainly not for me, mainly a classical listener. Of course, if you have a large vinyl collection, analog updates might be very worth while, but it's perplexing to me that people who don't already have an LP collection would want to get into it.

Worse, it's impeding the replacement of the CD, granted, a less than optimal medium. SACD and DVD-A are really significant improvements, not so much for the hi-rez but for multichannel. But SACD, DVD-A, and LP are all niche products and will stay that way. Of the three, surely LP is the least good and the least practical.