Why do you listen to records?

I like variety, so I have both analog and digital.

For analog, I have various cartridges on various tonearms: detailed (VDH,Lyra..), musical Koetsu, SPUs….  Deciding if will try DAVA field coil and/or DS Audio carts for different sonic presentations due to unique cartridge technology.

Because when put on a record I get to surrender to 20 minutes of mystery.  Sometimes it beats picking/curating each and every note.

I listen to records for the feeling it invokes when I get into a listening session. 

Occasionally, other formats achieve this too, but not as consistently as vinyl records.

Records were the only source outside of radio, and cassette decks didn't arrive until high school, and even then, we only made recordings, never purchasing pre-recorded tapes.  It was just natural to play records, never thinking it was a chore; it was what it was.  When I purchased my first CD player in the mid-eighties, I was already into better equipment, visiting the audio specialist dealers in town, and I enjoyed it too, maybe in a different way than LPs; my Philips machine was a heavily modified model, and I was happy with it.  These days, I buy fewer, quite a bit fewer records but in the last week I did pick up a half dozen or so.  I wasn't familiar with Jacques Loussier until a week ago, and checked all my usual local sources to no avail until lastly, who I should have spoke to first, Professor Rob(that's how I refer to him) at Musicdirect, not only was familiar with him had an unopened LP plus a mint Decca London double LP of a live performance from 1965 and I also picked up the new ELP reissue of there first record on MOFI.  I brought my two copies of ELP's 1st record to prove to myself that the new digitally sourced record could not better, nice original LPs, but was I proven wrong. Blows away any other copy that I ever heard, not even close, so I couldn't leave without one.  Plus MusicDirect was having a Rega event going on with lots of turntables and checkups of customers' turntables, any table for free!  It was a fun afternoon of records, food, and lively conversation.  The question for me would be: how can I not like records?  They're kind of in the blood.  One last point: anyone into streaming should read NYT journalist, Liz Pelly's  book, "Mood Machine" and how Spotify changed the music business by commoditizing artists work as if it was a bushel of soybeans or corn, paying artists next to nothing and creating AI artists.  What I find really weird is how some of these artificial (artists?), have management companies with managers.  I wonder what Peter Grant would have thought of all of this if he were alive.  Eh, he probably would have got the boys a great financial deal anyways.

I went over to this guy’s house a couple of years ago who used to brag endlessly about his very high end analog front end (100k or something).

"Your viny playback sounds lofi/midfi, you say? You just haven’t spent enough" was his talking point.....

I took a few records with me, some that i know have quite a bit of surface noise and different pestilences. He spins it on his rig and it seems awful quiet....very suspicious. He didn’t mind me opening up the chassis on his phono stage briefly...and there it was, an adc chain, dsp engine...whatever, hidden away. 

I think some guys are using a sugarcube (adc, clean up, dac) on the budget end...to clean up their vinyl sound...dumbest thing, if you ask me.

If you are archiving things as best as possible, i can very well understand the above...but, just for playback? No thanks, i’ll stick with my gimmick free hires official studio master instead.

Funny enough, these are also the guys who took arms because mofi did some digital with their vinyl masters and ruined their "analog purity" apparently (facepalm). Up until the night before, mofi’s record was the best sounding record they had...until they found out about mofi’s digital intervention.

P.S. If you have Mark Levinson’s master class software, it literally creates the sound of master tape from any digital file....but, no, the medium fanatics can only feel good if they botched up a hires digtial studio master and pressed it on vinyl. Heck, I wouldn’t even put that master on a cd. "Artist intent" got lost a lot, i bet.

I listen to them insofar as I have to, in order to digitize them and apply digital audio restoration to them so that there are no more infernal clicks and pops from their previous owners’ neglect, lessened hiss, ameliorated inner groove distortion et al. even on high end equipment at audio salons I hear these things that everybody else there seems deaf to.