Why do YOU love Vinyl/or hate vinyl

LOL, looks like a bunch of us who enjoy vinyl just don't pass Mach12's Audiophile Purity Test.  We better hand in our audiophile cards, pronto!

I have listened to a (mostly) all digital system since the late 80's, and up until recently spent most of my time streaming my ripped CDs and Tidal to my system, using my ipad interface.  With countless songs at my fingertips I found myself surfing music more than really listening.  I couldn't even remember most of the artists I listened to on Tidal.

It was setting up my turntable again that made me notice how much more I pay attention to the music when spinning vinyl.  I upgraded to a nice new turntable and it's aided my focusing more on music than I have in may years.  It's routine now for me to sit down for at least an album side, often a whole album.   Just tonight I listened to 4 whole albums!


Anyway....this doesn't support Mach12's thesis so I suppose he'll ignore that data.  Now, where did I put my audiophile card again?......

I like the ritual of playing vinyl and how that ritual can extract a different type of focus from me. I like the manually of being in touch with the materials and objects. I like looking at the turntable work and the vinyl spin. I like witnessing the outlandish subtlety of the tonearm floating along the groove. I like the cover art I can hold in my hand ... a digital image doesn’t accrue history and change in its journey through time like my album covers do; instead they inhabit an abstract realm ungrounded in the physical world. I like the programmatic imperative of the LP side, of one thing following another, of (over?)determined sequence which must be physically intruded upon and intercepted to upset. I like the needle touching vinyl and introducing ’anticipatory sound’ then tracking the groove and reproducing music. I like being forced to get up out of my seat to flip/remove/replace/insert and being forced to give myself over to the process instead of distracting myself. I like the inscrutable struggles that inhere in relating to the mechanical nature of TTs and analogue ... it’s like a relationship and shifts around. I like locating the hole. I like looking at vinyl after it’s cleaned gleaming. I like the goodies and posters that come with albums (I still have my DSOTM poster with green infrared photo of the Great Pyramids of Giza). I like the labels, the colored vinyl, the smell of papers. I like the surprises (I once took my parents Panasonic TT receiver and speakers outside into the backyard on a bright summer morning while laying out catching some rays ... at one point the sound started becoming weird ... the vinyl had softened in the sun and was melting and drooping over the side of the platter as it played like Dali’s soft watches). I like that you have to be there. HERE. Not just anywhere, the music is where the TT is not where you are. I like the moments bodies have hit the ground hard and the needles jumps. I like flipping through the stacks in record stores and how one gets their flip finger tuned up and dialed in ... where else in life does one get an opportunity to exercise their flip skills like that? I like how moving heavy stacks of albums reminds me how cumbersome and recalcitrant the material world is and that I have to relate to it and cannot escape it. I like how the embodied actions of spinning vinyl can, at times, have a nostalgia wired into them which sometimes connects with the music being played and with memory and which all on occasion align themselves in a manner that elicits felt emotions that are not summoned simply by the sounds alone.

I don’t like that TT drive belt salesmen can retire rich after a career selling $30 rubber bands.

I’ve enjoyed reading this thread. I definitely love playing vinyl records. Like others it is a mix of nostalgia, the physical process, the beautiful record covers to read while I listen, the hunt for old vinyl in the record shops, and the beautiful music that LPs can produce.
But honestly it mainly comes down to two things for me.
One is that with an LP it makes me relax into the music more, I am less distracted, I play the whole record, and I feel more like I am at a concert and in the audience. The process of playing a side of an LP naturally discourages skipping tracks or repeating tracks. It encourages me to instead put on the LP, sit down, and relax for 20-60mins with beautiful music, just like I would if I went to a concert.
Two is that I love classical music recorded in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. The recording engineers at the time really knew how to properly capture a performance and make it feel like you are in the audience (not the engineer in the recording booth). And the best way to get these recordings is on the original vinyl LPs from that era. Plus there are so many wonderful musicians, performances and recordings from that time that only exist on LP. And it is really fun to go hunting for records and finding new performances.
If I have any kvetching to do, it is less about vinyl vs non-vinyl and more to do with the esthetic of modern recording engineers and producers. Back in the 60s/70s the target was speakers with a record player in a front room and people who wanted to feel like they have performers in the living room and the engineer/producers were masters at that esthetic. Now it seems like the target is headphone listeners who want to hear all the details and feel like they are the producer or in the recording studio.

fleschler

The mastering of the format is generally the key to great sound.

You've hit the nail on the head for me. As an engineer I know that vinyl is a hugely outdated and compromised format that requires electronic acrobatics just to get a flat frequency response before you even think about minimising the noise getting 200µV up to a healthy line level.
But I love it and will always choose to listen to a vinyl recording over a digital one.
My theory for which I have no real evidence whatsoever is that the format stops the mastering engineer from compressing the hell out of a track. It's well known that if you play a song through a hi-fi and then play it again a fraction louder e.g. 1/2 -1 dB then subjectively you'll prefer the second listening. I believe this trick has been used by many an unscrupulous snake oil salesman in listening tests. So when the mastering engineer comes to master for digital then he/she knows the song will end up back to back with some other artists work in a playlist. The temptation to increase the compression (and subjective loudness) to make the track 'pop' will be hard to resist. 
A recording needs to be specifically mastered for vinyl, if it weren't then a lot of digital masters would make the stylus pop straight out of the groove and skid across the surface. And no vinyl lover minds turning up a bit to compensate for a quiet recording, so there's no motive for the mastering engineer to go mad with the compression.
Even if I'm wrong, I can't help liking vinyl with all its flaws... as the British radio DJ, John Peel said 'Listen mate, life has surface noise'.

Can't say I like the vinyl record but have grown from it a long time ago. Why get stuck in a few piles of vinyl when a whole world of music is in front of your feet and just wait for you to discover new wonderful music that Streaming offers.
I'm not going to sit in front of a vinyl record player, life is too short for this :)