For me, playing LP's does one thing that all the Qobuz and Amazon Music HD subscriptions I have cannot do. It encourages me to stop and just listen to the whole thing from start to finish.
I could of course, just get up and skip over songs like I do when the tablet is in my hand playing digital music. Somehow, something inside me doesn't want to do that. I've set aside this time to listen to albums (typically two per evening), and I only get up to flip the record over and play Side 2. While it's playing, I've often got the album cover and liner sleeve in hand. I enjoy that. No CD or digital stream is going to give me the cool and funny inner sleeve artwork and tongue-in-cheek humor of what's in the Traveling Wilburys album. Plenty of other details that simply can't be duplicated any other way.
The music is great. That's what I'm listening to is music. I well-know that digital music format has nearly twice the dynamic range. Oddly, the music itself doesn't have that range. The engineers of recording process already took out the widest expanse of dynamic range and created something that's more pleasing to my brain and ears. I'm listening to the music, not my turntable, phono stage, pre-amp, power amp, and speakers.
I've bought a number of limited-release MoFi records and they sound really great, but the digitally-remastered version still sounds clinically cleaner. So what. With a perfectly aligned cartridge, good balance of tonearm and cartridge mass, a reasonably rumble-free platter and the right (for my ears) stylus shape, I like it better than digital even if others say it's distortion. If this is what distortion sounds like, bring it on.
