Why do some people buy and listen to vinyl records?

[hunter]

42. For the gloriously large cover art...

... and the tactile joy of setting an LP down on a record player and gently dropping the needle down onto the outside groove.

Yes, I said record player. Fancy turntables are madness in these days of CDs, MP3, and FLAC music. I appreciate the unique sound of a record player. I'm not aiming to reproduce music perfectly, an LP can't do that, no matter how much money you put into turntables and amplifiers and such.

Years ago my wife gave me a record player which had served many years in a university music library. It's a deliciously mechanical machine that will play everything from old 16s to 78s. It required only minimal repairs, a few bits of rubber and some capacitors.

Some early CDs sounded awful because engineers were not yet familiar with the medium. In the process of engineering music for LPs the engineer creating the original LP masters essentially became one of the musicians. His instrument was your record player. The music was mixed to sound it's very best on a turntable. Engineers who'd spent their careers mixing for the RIAA curve, which is a sort of compression that made the 33 1/3 LP record possible, had trouble remixing original studio tapes for CDs. Sometimes there were flaws in the original recording that hadn't made it past RIAA compression, and sometimes engineers played with the expanded capabilities of CDs and lost whatever musical "magic" had been added to an album when it was engineered for vinyl.

It's possible to engineer CDs to sound like vinyl, and there are still people, musicians in their own right, carrying on the craft of mixing music for vinyl.