Why vinyl?

Ihcho, I buy a lot of new vinyl, as much of it in my opinion is very good. I also buy good old unopened vinyl, and mint used. I find life is to short for crappy beatup vinyl to experiment. Are people buying new vinyl, if you read my post early on in this thread, I talked about The RTI pressing pland, who has never seen the volume of backlog for vinyl. For instance they mention they have orders in house initially for 50,000 of the Led Zeppelin box 4 LP sets. This is after the CDs has been out for awhile. Obviously that is 200,000 lps to produce, so yes there are a few customers. This does not includes all the other labels. So is it more then CD, no, but I do not think anybody ever thought it would be. But it is growing at a fast rate, while CDs fall off year by year to MP3 downloads. To a point that maybe even now daily MP3's aquired in some kind of legal or illegal download are actually used more daily then CD for music play.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Telarc records in '82 were $16.99. I bought one in Musicland. An audiophile label of course, just like the $30 new lp's of today. Let's not forget the huge weight, (and today's freight charges) involved in getting the lp's to the warehouse. Of course, I was a teenager in the late '70's, so $8.99 seemed like a load of money. $30 today also equals 6 Big Mac meals. Yuck.

I bought a lot of LPs for under $5, BUT my D2D and "audiophile" recordings were mostly in the mid-teens and some higher. I think you have to compare 180 gram current pressing to the high-end recordings of the 1970s and 1980s. When you do that, the cost ($30) feels comparable to me. $50 is a different story.

I've paid $50 for a lot of reissues. So far, the quality of the master and the pressings (particularly 45 rpms) have been worth it. (Thanksfully I make way more, inflation adjusted, money than I did in the '70s and '80s)

Dave

1) cheap used
2) very good sound is possible
3) older coots like me have a big investment in vinyl from the olden days already so why not more?
4) larger format with artwork that adds to the package and text fonts large enough to read.

By the way I forgot to mention. I have 10 gigs of digital music on my home laptop (listening to Joni Mitchell through headphones now), another couple gigs on my work laptop and we have a music server at work.
Mapman, I loved the big font comment. I first got glasses at 41 because I couldn't read the back of CDs - completely true.
We all use digital, it's convenient for casual listening or checking out music we may be interested in.