Opinion of people who purchase vinyl records nowadays

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Most people can't hear the difference, so I lean option 2.  Besides, if you really want to go authentically old school, you really ought to abandon transistors for vacuum tubes in your amplifiers.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Most people can't hear the difference, so I lean option 2.  Besides, if you really want to go authentically old school, you really ought to abandon transistors for vacuum tubes in your amplifiers.

It's not just the sound of the record.  It's the difference in format.  You're just more inclined to listen to an album more intently and take it in instead of frenetically flipping through itunes on your iphone or pc.  It's also just a cool machine, there's a novelty and ritual to putting on a record.  It recalls a time when music wasn't this disposable, drivel financed by a handful of massive corporations and producers for a stable of photoshopped, autotuned replicants for a global audience with all the discernment of a 12 year old with a chronic case of ADD.

Novelty?

In any case, if you want commitment to the way an artist puts together an album, listen to a tape rather than being able to pick which tracks you'll listen to.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a group of retrophile hipsters existed during heyday of 20s jazz who went around insisting that the hollow phonograph cylinders were the only way to go, and that all the modern jazz records are just soulless garbage devoid of ritual or pleasure.

Cylinders did have the advantage of having a constant linear speed as the needle went over the groove.  Platters didn't have that, so the sound quality degraded as one neared the center.  Indeed, because of that, there were a few disc recordings where it was considered important that the sound quality be at its best at the end of the record rather than the beginning that were recorded with the groove starting at the label and working out to the edge instead of the usual starting at the edge.  Of course, platters are far more convenient and the otherwise unusable center space gave a place for a label to identify the record when it was on the machine out of its container.  (Incidentally, the term "canned music" was coined in reference to the "cans" cylindrical records came in.)  Still, it wasn't until the sound quality of discs improved to the point that most people couldn't hear the difference that discs overtook cylinders in popularity.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

On a side note, I noticed that many of my 78RPM records from the late 1950s (around the time that they were finally phased out) sound a whole lot better than their 45RPM counterparts. Several examples of records that I have from the late 1950s that sound better on 78s than on 45s are "Twilight Time" by The Platters, "Little Star" by The Elegants, "Tonight Tonight" by The Mello-Kings, "Walking After Midnight" by Patsy Cline and "Johnny B Goode" by Chuck Berry. By that time those songs were released, the 78RPM format was basically over for the most part, with the exception of jukebox operators and the small number of people who still had older phonograph equipment built prior to the introduction of LP's and 45's in 1948 and 1949.

The 45 and 33⅓ RPM formats took advantage of better playback equipment to get acceptable sound quality on records whose principal advantage was longer playtime.  That longer playtime was not only because of the slower speed, but the grooves on the new formats were narrower and thus could be more closely packed.