Hi dakkon (Alex),
First of all, the so-called "resurgence" of vinyl just isn't. It's 0.0001% of consumers who are "into" vinyl, a miniscule number compared to the era before the introduction of the CD and digital recording.
Look, vinyl is fun. You get nice big graphics on the album cover, and it's entertaining to watch the disc slowly revolving and the tonearm work its way across the disc. Tried watching a CD playback? A huge bore.
It's also very involving as a hobby, because you have to make certain the tonearm is perfectly set up, aligned and balanced, with the correct tracking force. You need to carefully clean and de-staticize the disc before playing (there are lots of nifty accessories to help you do this, including cleaning machines). If you don't take care of vinyl and fastidiously clean it before every play, you'll go mad with all the ticks and pops and surface noise during playback.
When everything is set up carefully, preferably with a custom tonearm and expensive cartridge, vinyl can sound remarkably good, almost indistinguishable from a CD if the original masters are good. However, even with all that, things can get nasty sounding and distorted as the tonearm reaches the inner grooves, where even the best cartridges have trouble tracking loud dynamics. This never happens with a CD or digital recording.
I agree with everything that J.B. says, and many of the "purist" tweakophile bunch who love vinyl simply do so because analog recording--vinyl--is easy to understand: a stylus wiggles in a groove, modulating a magnet between coils of wire, generating an analog voltage that the preamp and amp amplify.
In my experience, most tweaks don't understand digital recording; they can't comprehend it, plus it actually hints of pure science and math, which is what it is. There has always been a distinct anti-science bias in high-end audio magazines, which is why they won't do controlled blind testing. They like to believe that audio equipment has mystical qualities, and that extends to vinyl.
As to younger enthusisasts, they're either unwilling to do careful comparisons, or simply ignorant of all of vinyl's many audible limitations or perhaps they simply tune them out. The power of psychological bias is huge. There are thousands of awful-sounding recordings on vinyl, and lots of those have been transferred to CD, and sound just as bad on CD. Conversely, there are wonderful sounding analog masters, which once transferred to CD, are a revelation--no surface noise, no tick and pops, no inner-groove distortion, huge dyamics (far greater than an LP can encompass), plus utter freedom from audible wow and flutter. And no deterioration with repeated playings.
The first time I heard a digital recording of a grand piano (at an AES meeting in Toronto in the late 1970s), totally free of flutter (the slight wavering in pitch that's inherent in all vinyl playback and mastering), it was a revelation. This was before the introduction of the compact disc. It was a digital recording played back on a Sony U-matic VCR and all of the recording engineers present were thrilled with the distortion free sound and silent background.
Anyway, it's kind of an apples/oranges comparison. I don't discount the warm, fuzzy feeling that lots of enthusiasts get watching their LPs revolve and fondling those big record jackets, but it's an obsolete technology, like vacuum tubes and their pretty glowing filaments.
Have fun with your turntable and vinyl discs. But embracing it over digital recordings is like wanting a laptop computer with vacuum tubes (it would crush your lap!) Would you prefer a nice old antique CRT TV set, with its 100-pound cathode ray picture tube over a plasma or LCD flat screen? Or perhaps a tube-powered VCR? (It would take up an entire room and require its own air-cooling system.)
Cheers,
Alan
