Please Read and express your feelings and opinions....

Similarly, others see the pops and ticks, rapid wear, uneven high frequency performance, limited dynamic range, increased distortion, wow, and flutter associated with ancient vinyl technology as "more authentic".

Pops and ticks are often a sign of an unstable phono stage with poor overload margins and in that regard, price has nothing to do with it. People often confuse ticks and pops with the media. But when an LP is produced, the producer has to sign off on the test pressing, and one of the things they sign off on is the noise floor of the LP including ticks and pops. I have plenty of LPs at home that play the entire side without a problem- and I played some of those at the recent AXPONA show as a demo of how important phono preamp stability is. Speed variation is really a thing of the past- no machine made today or anytime in the last 30 years has audible wow and flutter unless malfunctioning.

I run a studio and an LP mastering facility; LPs are usually uncompressed with regard to the digital release files (this is because the industry expects the latter to be played in cars). We usually have to request the files in a form untreated by DSP other than normalization. Our cutter head is indeed ancient, being a Westerex 3D; the 1700 mastering amplifiers are cut off at 42KHz, which is the practical upper FR of almost any LP- not that there is anything up there, but most people don't realize that the LP has that sort of bandwidth (and has since the late 1950s). As far as distortion goes- that mostly occurs in playback, not record and in that regard is highly variable according to the ability of the arm to actually track the cartridge correctly, and how stable the phono section actually is. That distortion is often much lower than cited by those with a myopic digital viewpoint.

It should be telling that Technics has chosen to jump back into the LP market with 3 'table entries- all of which were seen at the recent AXPONA. LP titles are far easier to find now and sales are still on the rise; the market seems to like them despite their being somehow 'inferior'. Usually when a succeeding art replaces the prior art, the latter is usually consigned to the dust bins of history and the occasional collector. But the LP isn't doing that- all the pressing houses in the US are busy and often backed up 6 months. 1992, 26 years ago, was the year of least vinyl production.

@cj1965     You complained in an earlier thread about constantly going over the same ole subject matter and how it should be or is handled.... 
You might want to take a look at MANY older threads.
This has all already been covered. 

almarg

“... Which serves to illustrate, IMO, that when it comes to many of the more controversial things in audio the truth is usually a good deal more nuanced than viewpoints that tend to be expressed by those at or near both extremes of the belief spectrum, and usually lies somewhere in between.”

>>>Oh, my, what’s this, a compromise! An olive branch? Why would anyone call these things controversial? Except for an extremely small percentage, the results of these“controversial” tweaks are all positive. Calling them controversial appears to be nothing more than a ploy or wishful thinking on the part of long term deniers - the most vociferous most of whom never even tried the device under scrutiny. Give me a break! Are they trying perhaps to justify all the backslapping and cutting & pasting of their wild “scientific” theories they’ve been circulating for years trying to get some traction? Do the math.

No controversial audiophile tweak has ever been proven to be a hoax or a fraud. - old audiophile axiom

My opinion on the "failings" of yester-decade's gear is if those characteristics were desirable, why isn't anybody listening to wax cylinders on hand cranked phonographs? After all, the motorized, tube amplified, voice coil driven sound of the 30's was an evolution of that.

@timlub 
Nobody is building class A amps without measuring some voltage and current at the very least. I'm not designing circuits over here. Most of the heavy measuring has already been done. If I get my voltages and currents somewhere on the range of where the circuit has been measured at, there's good reason to believe that I'm achieving results consistent with those measurements. The hardest thing I've had to do is learn to listen for what distortion is. That has brought me into strong agreement with the belief that dynamics are closely associated with distortion. It took me a while to figure out I should just put the damn meter down and listen, twist pots, listen more, twist more pots, and just get it right. I'm very eager to measure what I'm listening to. I feel I've achieved good results trying to tune two channels by ear and I'm curious to see what those numbers really look like. Not that I'd change it. The sound is smooth, articulate, wide, tall, deep, and well centered. It's the best amp I've ever heard. 

@geoffkait 
There mere fact that these snake oil tweaks get nothing but gloating adoration and no criticism for the results by those who try them strongly suggests that it's a psychological phenomenon, not an objective phenomenon. Since you're so fond of wrongly citing rational arguments as "logical fallacy", I'll point out your very real logical fallacy.