The resurgence of vinyl is not about sound quality it is about hipsters being ironically cool.
Distilling the vinyl renaissance down to one minor cultural phenomenon is simplistic and ignores gobs of evidence that moves in several different directions.
At this point, the vinyl resurgence is too big and too long-lasting to be a fad. The vinyl resurgence started getting noticed about nine years ago. Evidence of the resurgence suggests several different markets. Current pop artists are issuing vinyl versions of their albums, mostly from digital sources. One could say that market serves the hipsters.
But what about Acoustic Sounds? It's the biggest single vendor of new vinyl. Or others in the same market--MusicDirect, ElusiveDisc, SoundStageDirect, etc.? $35 reissues of 1958-1964 RCA, Everest, and Mercury classical recordings (and Verve, Prestige, Columbia, and Concord Group jazz albums) are hardly aimed at hipsters. Nor are the new Beatles mono vinyl releases.
Also, since the vinyl resurgence, we have seen McIntosh come out with a turntable for the first time, Marantz came out with its first turntable in a looong time, and the few turntable manufacturers who continued through the dark days have exponentially expanded their lines: Rega, Pro-Ject, Music Hall have all gone from 2-3 item product lines to many times that.
Do you think for a moment that hipsters are fueling the expansion of audiophile turntables, cartridge offerings, phono preamps and step-up devices?
In fact, even vinyl-spinning hipsters couldn't prevent Technics from discontinuing the SL12x0 series of direct drive turntables. It's caused the boutique belt-drive companies to expand their product lines and thrive.
To say it's all hipsters or a consumer-mad society is narrow-focus and dismissive. Most of the turntables come from Europe, even the USA-branded ones. The McIntosh and Marantz models were sourced from Clearaudio. Other makers are Rega, Linn, Naim, Funk Firm, Music Hall, and Pro-Ject. All those makers continued and thrived because European music lovers refused to abandon vinyl. That's not hipsters or consumerism; it's finding the intrinsic musical value amidst decades of digital hype.
The trendy crap is Crosley, Numark, Ion, etc. Those would satisfy the hipster market, but the sonically driven quality stuff is for the rest of us. Let's not forget that the aging baby boom is a lump of 75 million American consumers, and many of us (me included) are having one last analog hurrah of our beloved music while we still can.
