There's an article in yesterday's Times about vinyl records making a comeback. The article doesn't quite get around to saying it, but the reason is romance. There's an analogy with steam.
From the 1830s to the 1950s, the way to move heavy loads over land was by steam locomotive powered train. Steam locomotives were noisy, dangerous, dirty, took a lot of skill and attention to operate well, and spent almost half their useful lives in the shop being worked on. But they were the best thing that had been invented and there were a lot of impressive developments over that century+ that made them better and better. It was a completely revolutionary technology, the Diesel-Electric Hybrid, that finally replaced them in the early '50s. They were cleaner, much lower maintenance and labor, could be partially automated, much more efficient. The fans of the romance of railroads hated them. Steam locomotives seemed like almost a living thing, with real personality. Most of the works were on the outside, with bucking, hissing, roaring, chuffing emissions of steam and smoke. "Diesels" as they came to be called, were boring in comparison. Everything was on the inside and the noises and gasses they emitted were fewer and less interesting.
At about the same time steam locomotives were being replaced by diesel, earlier shellac phonograph records that spun at 78 RPM were being replaced by 33 1/3rd RPM LP records made of Poly Vinyl Chloride, aka Vinyl. My dad was an audio enthusiast at this time and built a series of systems, mostly from kits. The transistor had been invented, but they weren't cheap enough for this application yet, so these mostly used vacuum tubes. Consequently I was a bit of an audio enthusiast, too. Vinyl records seemed fragile and awkward though. It didn't take much abuse to introduce a permanent pop or click or wow or static into the media. When the CD first became available, I immediately became a big enthusiast. They were more expensive, but they were smaller, much easier to handle, had sound as perfect as the recording engineer could produce, and were almost indestructible. Several of my audiophile friends did A-B comparisons. With a brand new record on top quality equipment, nobody could tell the difference. But once the vinyl had been played a few times, it was easy to tell them apart. Better equipment preserved them for longer, but even the best couldn't keep a record pristine for more than a dozen plays or so.
Bottom line: if you prefer the sound of vinyl, it's either because you like static and scratches (this is a real thing), or because you can't hear or don't care about the difference, and prefer the romance. Romance is a legitimate reason to like something. The same is true of tube amplifiers. You can do an accurate simulation of any tube's response curve with a relatively simple transistor circuit (Field Effect Transistors..FETs do this almost automatically)...or software. But doing so adds the same distortion of tubes, albeit with much greater efficiency. If you like tube amps, it's because there's something other than the fidelity or efficiency that you like. It could be the warm, soft clipping, or perhaps the warm glow of the tube heaters. But far more likely it's the romance.
A railroad that tried to use steam locomotives as their primary motive power today would be uncompetitive. The labor costs are enormously higher. They have some desirable operating properties (very high starting torque, for example). But they are romantic. So many keep a few around, in a museum, or as tourist rides. I like industrial history, and I especially like steam locomotives, so I frequent these. I have no love for vinyl, but I understand the urge. It's the same urge that's behind steampunk and a host of other nostalgic cravings. It makes no practical sense. But it's romantic.
(For a long time, there was something that vacuum tubes can do that transistors can't: extremely high power. But today's MOSFETs and other new technologies can do most of that--tech that wasn't available when I was studying this stuff in college in the 1970s. The one area where vacuum tubes still have a market is for things like the final stage of a high power radio transmitter. Over a few hundred watts, semiconductors get pretty expensive and their thermal advantages are lost. Things like commercial radio transmitters and max-power private transmitters generally use tubes in their final stage. I got to see KNKX-FM's setup on top of Tiger Mountain a few years ago (thanks Lowell Kiesow and Joey Cohn) which was pretty darned cool. The final tubes (68,000 watts) are about as big as a shoebox and are in a box about the size of a refrigerator.)
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