Does Age Matter?

This year I bought LPs for my 37 year old nephew and the 16 year old daughter of my best friend’s son. Both are starting vinyl systems for the first time. So as far as my personal anecdotal experience goes, no. Your generalization does not apply.

I honestly don’t care about the format. Over the years I have learned to appreciate good music and how it sounds regardless of the recorded medium. I equally enjoy spinning Vinyl, CD’s and Streaming tunes. There is no clear winner in my system and to my ears simply because of the attention to detail towards each competing format.

As @chakster pointed out, Streaming is a great medium to discover and appreciate music. What’s remarkable to me is how Vinyl has managed to sustain its presence in last 50 plus years :-)

55 - prefer analog. Stream to discover music or hard to find vinyl.

I do think age is a factor on the preference of digital or analog. A few reasons why: older generation has more money to invest in analog; older generation does not benefit much from the convenience of digital; older generation does not fully know how much a quality DAC can improve the sound from digital media; Actually vinyl sounds better if you compare the same music produced in vinyl and CD.

However there are many other factors to consider. For example, whether you are a type of person who is more likely to follow the fashion or trend. Large population of young generation follows the trend and what is cool.
Fremer showed a data that shows that the purchase of vinyls in 2020 is spread evenly over age groups. That is, 20~30 age group purchased similar amount of LPs as 50~60 did. Interestingly, many of those 20-30 age group do not own audiophile system. Then, why did they purchase vinyls?
Well, most of them felt vinyl is cool (putting the LP on the table and putting the needle on top of the spinning vinyl, as well as the artistic material that comes with vinyl) and followed the trend of owning physical media of music. And Some buy vinyl as an investment.
You know, many LPs produced by young artists since 2000 fetch whole lot more money these days. My 18 year old son sent me a list of LPs he wanted to buy, and I looked at the price of new and many of them sell at over $100. VG+ or Mint- from discogs selling at over $40.
Also, some of the new albums I bought over the past 20 years sell at over twice in VG+ or Mint- condition. So, even though the older generation audiophile tends to prefer vinyl over digital for whatever reason, there is a strong movement from younger generation valuing LPs more than CDs, not necessarily because they appreciate the sound quality of Vinyl over CD.

I appreciate both CD and LP. No digital file because I don’t have a system that plays the lossless files. For music in both CD and LP, I most definitely listen to LP than CD unless LP is in less than VG or the recording quality is poor. By the way, I have about 4000 LPs (2500 classical, 500 jazz, 500 rock/pop, and 500 misc) and 1000 CDs (500 classical, 300 Jazz, 200 rock/pop/misc).

I will be 69 in a few weeks, vinyl is my preference and listen to it 90% of the time, have very good digital (CD) frontends in both my systems and it does sound marvelous.. Enjoy the music