This question comes up a lot. It is usually referring to the youth market, but I think the reasons we list below apply to people of all ages, and specifically to people who are not audiophiles. At least not self-described as audiophiles.

One reason is peer-pressure. Social network-induced coolness factor.

An important reason. Probably the major reason. But this Oreo-cookie of a Vinyl Renaissance has a healthy chewy center.

1. Everyone knows that CDs cost pennies to make. So when people see $20 price tags on a music CD they experience a cognitive price disconnect. Similarly, when they see that music CDs cost as much as movie DVDs, which have much more content and generate perhaps 100X the viewership – another unpleasant price shock pains the brain.

LPs do not have this problem. We just can’t make our own LPs on our PCs [or 3D printers yet]. This is perceived as some kind of added value.

A. Corollary – LPs are also cheaper [except new audiophile-grade LPs. Whew!]. From about 50 cents [used] to 10 bucks [new jazz, used rock].

2. Everyone ‘knows’ that all digital playback sounds the same. It’s just bits, right? The range is pretty much a $50 blu-ray player at Wall-mart to a $300 Oppo or full-featured Sony at Amazon. The ultimate consumer electronics commodity.

But turntables? They are not seen as a commodity. Although most sound alike [much more so than digital, and at all price ranges] nobody has been beating them [or audiophiles either] over the head with this message; certainly not for decades and decades. A $1000 turntable is something special.

3. Free music downloads and subscription services like Spotify and Pandora make digital music seem ubiquitous and ‘corporate’. Digital music is a utility. No one is going to turn off their music stream, but it doesn’t feel ‘special’ anymore to lots of people who have lived with it for almost a decade now.

Analog however does not seem tied to a specific corporate entity. It is a little bit counter-culture-ish and unique, a little bit independent, a little bit ‘off the internet grid’.

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You notice I did not say it is being adopted because it sounds better.

The reason many people cannot hear the difference between cables is because their systems are not resolving enough [a pox on the manufacturers who sell $20K+ systems like this].

I do not know how resolving a system has to be for the average person to be able to hear a difference between analog and digital. I think musicality is a benefit of analog but not the driving force behind its adoption.

Stereophile has a post that has sparked quite a few comments, many of which provide a perspective on the industry which can be illuminating:

How revive high-end audio

Of course, you have to rule out the comments that go something like:

“High-end audio is dying because of all the high-priced gear”. Yeah. Right. And the Lamborghini and Bugatti Veyron, etc. are killing the auto industry too.

“It is all the snake oil that is killing high-end audio.” Snake oil is essentially all gear whose positive effect contradicts their belief system. Unfortunately for these people [and one of the most awesome and beautiful things about reality for the rest of us], the fact-based universe has many things that are real but we do not yet understand. Yeah, losers take potshots at us, but they used to make fun of LPs too [ 🙂 ]

“It is the untrustworthiness of the reviewers [too corrupt]. Or dealers [too unlike their customers]. Or manufacturers [too quick to raise prices for modest improvements]”. But all [nearly] people we know trust reviewers implicitly no matter what trouble they get themselves into, will find another source of the gear they want if their dealer is lacking [or just to save on taxes], and, finally, care little about specific models of products and can always seem to find something they want at the price they want [and so do not care if the price is too high, they just go find something else that they ‘hear’ is ‘supposed’ to sound as ‘good’].

These kind of comments assume there is an evil culprit, of the author’s choosing, that is to blame. A culprit instead of a systemic change in the way we think of and interact with music.

Although the middle class no longer exists the way it did a few decades ago, and disposable income is eaten up by the banks [debt., student loans and their interest payments] and Apple, it is freed up by fewer, cheaper, more reliable and longer lasting cars [and the looming death of the consumer desktop PC] – so the relative availability of funds may be a wash.

There are systemic influences – that are not really changes but the result of decades of repeating the same message over and over. Bose is the best brand. Digital is the best media. Solid-state is the best electronics.

The systemic changes are, it seems to me:

* More convenient access to more music – searchable access to not just thousands of albums but millions

* Nobody has any free time anymore. Smartphones killed whatever free time the kids used to have. The rest of us consider 40 hour works weeks to be like a ‘vacation’. The very time itself, spent on ‘focused’ or ‘active’ listening, is all of a sudden just extremely expensive for most people.

* There is no champion of high-end audio. Strangely well-respected and fashionable dog-eat-dog business ethics in combination with the Great Recession have made most players at all levels in audio enemies of each other. They fight each other instead of fighting bad fidelity. The proposals as mentioned in the Stereophile article have no chance. We even tried one of our own detailed proposals to help save dealers from extinction and circulated it around – but nobody cared. Whether dealers are suicidal or just do not trust anyone else in the business, it doesn’t matter. It is just symptomatic of the fact that to the public, there is [and will likely not be, as per the previous sentence] no one publicizing the coolness and awesomeness that *IS* high-end audio. 😉