Alex
The vinyl resurgence has been around for about 15 years now, so it’s far from ‘sudden’. I suppose when other companies jump on the bandwagon and cheap decks appear everywhere, it may seem sudden though.
I think part of it came about after the boom in MP3 (mainly due to Napster) and the illegal file share sites of the time. ‘Computer people’ who used these sites didn’t seem too bothered about sound quality, preferring smaller file sizes for quick downloading. Compressed music didn’t seem too much of an issue at the time as products people use every day had been lowering sound quality - TVs were getting thinner, so speakers used in them were getting small and flatter, producing thin, weedy sound systems. This was the norm for about 10 years, and from this, music streaming services started to appear. I’m not sure exactly what kick started it, but hearing records after this period made them sound pretty damn amazing! A lot of people realised what they had been missing all this time, and dug their old records out the loft and got back into it.
I know records aren’t the most neutral sounding medium, but they sound “natural” - their frequency extremes are gradually rolled off, dynamics smoothed a little, making them sound a little easier on the ear. Midrange sounds tend to be a little more prominent, which I feel is possibly the reason some people class vinyl as “organic”. Certainly, if you compare the likes of Boards Of Canada on CD and vinyl, it’s almost a different experience (to those who know the music well). Back in the 90s, I was used to hearing Tears For Fears’ Seeds Of Love album on CD - I picked up a used copy on vinyl some years later and it was like listening to a different album! Funnily, one of my first thoughts when hearing it was, “so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like!”.
As mentioned, it’s also quite possible that people are looking to vinyl as a protest against music streaming services (“music rental”, as I call it). But I think if this was the case, CD sales wouldn’t be dropping.
For me, when listening to the likes of Foo Fighters and heavier rock type music, drums seem to sound better. More specifically, crash cymbals. Much of the time when listening to CD or streaming services, drums just sound like they come from the front face of the speaker, giving a flat performance, but on vinyl, drums seem to have a certain depth in the overall image, and crash cymbals certainly don’t seem come from the drive units, it’s like they’re set back slightly. It’s hard to explain, it I’ve had people agree with me on that before, so I know it’s not me being crazy