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
This says it all, vinyl is constrained. I dig vinyl and have many albums on vinyl, but it is not this magical, mythical, etherial experience people make it out to be. Anything you play on vinyl had to be mastered specifically for vinyl, with limitations. I won’t go in to all the details and limiting factors of vinyl, but I can say that any record made within the last 15 or more year was most definitely produced with a DAW. DAW stands for digital audio workstation and any modern/semi decent computer can run a DAW, when the producers/engineers/musicians make an album, it is digital. Whether us audio appreciators want to accept it or not. They export a WAV from the DAW and that’s the highest quality version – as close to the artists vision we will get, anything other than this is a downgrade/crossgrade… I’m sorry, I hate to say it, but it is. I know vinyl has unique characteristics and we love the experience, but it will never be able to reproduce 1:1 what the DAW spat out. It has to be ‘remastered’ for vinyl – a cross grade. Now, and I never understood this in the Audiofile realm, if you want a super accurate representation of what the artist heard, grab some studio monitors and listen to the wav/flac, you will get as close to what the artist heard. Anything else will colour the sound. Rant over