Instant gratification - something you can get with downloading MP3s from iTunes and shooting with a digital camera. I don't think many of the younger generation sit down for the purpose of listening to music, they listen to music while they do something else. Driving, doing homework, working, at the gym, etc. Turntables and film cameras can be extremely impractical in those situations. Camera phone? Many don't want the experience of developing film, printing and smelling the chemicals. They want to immediately upload to their PC and email to friends, or send it directly from the phone.
I enjoy sitting down with a friend or two, have a couple of cold ones and sink the cartridge needle into the grooves of an LP and let the music be experienced. Vinyl sounds great - better than most high resolution digital formats even, warts and all. The audio mania out there though is steering towards higher end equipment, though, with steeper and steeper price tags.
If film photography goes the same way as vinyl is going, it's going to get expensive. It might get better too, but at a steeper price. A good turntable today will run you about $2,000, a good tone arm about $600, a decent cartridge about $500, and then you need to buy albums. Many of them cost as much as $50 a piece, and they are spectacular products, with sound quality we could only dream of from the medium twenty years ago.
To me, that meant that I am collecting less albums, but at a higher quality.
And CDs are improving in sound quality too - by a mile. The crap produced in the 90s sound like $hit - full of nasty digital harshness with tons of white noise in the high notes, and difficult to listen to when the music gets complicated with a collapsing sound stage.
Quality over quantity - I am the odd duck today, that's for sure.
- Thomas