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
Just from a data perspective, there’s infinitely more data in an analog recording than a digital one. So it really depends on the mastering process. You lose data converting from analog to digital.
But if the song was digitally mastered to begin with, converting digital to analog makes 0 sense. It makes me cringe when a clients that ask me to install a record player and then asks me to install an analog to digital converter so they can play the record on their whole house audio system.
do you really lose data though? if you’re sampling the wave at say 48KHz with a good ADC what are you losing?