I think the point missed is that you could take those records you had in your youth and play them on a top quality high-fidelity system and get truly high quality sound. With the compressed formats today you have a built in limiter on just how good they are capable of sounding. A person can buy hundreds of songs in a compressed format and then decide to go with a nice high-fidelity playback system and will discover he has to replace his entire library of songs to get the most of his playback system. With the older records and standard CD's, you can keep upgrading your equipment and keep seeing an improvement without having the recordings become obsolete.

Dave