To me, LPs and CDs are like ANALOG PHONES and FILM CAMERAS...
JUST OUTDATED..
So is sitting stuck in front of a hi-fi system listening to music. You could just use earbuds attached to your phone and get music anywhere you want. Few things look to the rest of the modern world more "outdated" than the audiophile sitting between a pair of speakers doing nothing but listening, much less caring that much about the sound.
But audiophiles find the gear part of the pleasure of listening to music.
Books are "outdated" in the sense you don’t need them to deliver the reading content anymore. But they are far from "outdated" insofar as they offer a tactile, collectable experience, and allows one to unplug from digital life for a while, which fill desires many people have that ipads etc don’t fulfill.
Similarly, turntables and vinyl are only "outdated" in the narrowest scope of being a "convenient, performance-leading music delivery system." That sounds pretty comprehensive, but it’s clearly not. Turntables have an aesthetic, tactile and engineering appeal to many of us that no CD player or iphone app can replicate. Digital delivery has not "caught up" to turntables in that regard. Same for records themselves. Many of us find a world of difference between the aesthetics and tactile nature of how LPs look and feel, vs CDs or collecting music digitally. I can see the album art when streaming a song via my ipad app, but it doesn’t produce anything like the satisfaction of buying and owning music on an LP, which is not only more aesthetically pleasing but feels more like actually "owning" the music and ’having a music collection" instead of something virtual.
Then there is the sound. Vinyl tends to sound different than digital sources. And in a way that many of us actually really like, so even if digital could *in principle* mimic the same sound, in practice it normally doesn’t, and thus turntables/vinyl provides an experience and meets a desire that digital does not.
And of course there is the previously mentioned fact that a great proportion of vinyl users find it encourages more focused listening, and encourages listening to more than one song on an album, where access to a vast digital catalogue at one’s finger-tips tends to encourage a more fidgety, surfing-music experience. If you look at articles on the resurgence of vinyl and/or follow people getting in to vinyl - and the reddit vinyl community is a good one - you will see this aspect of vinyl mentioned over and over.
None of that of course means everyone has the same goals or experiences, and given other desires a fully digital system/streaming etc will be a much better choice for some people.
But there are desires among music lovers and audiophiles that are not in fact met as well by digital sources as they are by turntables and vinyl, hence they are not "outdated" in that sense.
