I am sitting in my living room, doing updates on a P4 tower I'm setting up for my sister, while copying files from my desktop to my laptop, with my cobbled-together HTPC (with access to 20 gb of music) up on the rear projection TV I found last summer.
Instead of having any one of the computers running all around me play music, I am playing Gowan's Strange Animal LP on the turntable.
... Methinks I'm a bit odd.
Supposedly, the old vinyl's have higher fidelity than any digital formats.
That's -somewhat- true, with a very expensive turntable, that has been perfectly balanced and tuned, with a mint-condition LP and no ambient noise in the room the player is in. None of which I have, my turntable being a mid-range mid-80's Akai with a $50 needle that doesn't really match the player, and my copy of Strange Animal having been played over and over by my mother as I was growing up.
There is a bit of a subjective naturalness to vinyl, however, brought on by the inherent imperfections and the fact that the needle by necessity picks up on ambient noise, often making vinyl sound more spacious and giving it the impression of greater detail and soundstage, despite it likely being a product of imperfection rather than improved fidelity.
I was more commenting on the elements of logical backwardness of being surrounded by large collections of music in easy to access digital formats and yet still bothering to maintain a turntable, flip a record and retain the space for the whole setup in my fairly tiny apartment.
