i completely get preferring analog media, so if it’s about the sound characteristics (that ‘warmth’), having physical media, etc fair enough. but if the goal of an audiophile is to get the highest quality reproduction of a recording wouldn’t CDs or FLACs be your best bet?
maybe this only really applies for newer music, perhaps digital releases for music recorded analogue are just digitized vinyl or reel to reel recordings but for music produced in DAWs the highest quality version available for that release would surely be either a CD or a digital FLAC release
Personally I treat vinyl as a bit of a novelty. I’m genX, so old enough to have heard plenty of vinyl as a kid, but we grew up owning tapes and then CDs, so vinyl was “the thing that was replaced”, associated with our parents. And 99.9% of the experiences from exposure to vinyl was negative - you can’t take it to go (no car audio, no boombox audio), you can’t easily skip tracks, and if the record is physically compromised, you hear the pops and even worse, it skips. Most of us never considered vinyl as a viable option because the negatives far outweighed any sonic advantage.
Fast forward to now. I have a fantastic stereo and can afford a nice turntable,but I choose to have an entry level table basically for the novelty. I can put on a 180 grain record and play it for my peers, amd they can’t believe how good it sounds. Mostly because my generation all has the same memory, unless you were listening to a true hifi set up, vinyl kinda sucked.
My long winded point - some if us like vinyl for many if the reasons listed by others already, but when push come to shove, digital is the way we prefer.