It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
It’s not necessarily hipsterism - it can be, but isn’t automatically.
Do you use a fountain pen for the image you present to the world, or because you genuinely like the experience of using one?
I used one a long time ago because I liked the way it wrote, and the technology had improved to where using one wasn’t an inconvenience.
I can understand someone wanting to use a modern incandescent flashlight for it’s color - all my good led flashlights use a similar color.
I can appreciate listening to vinyl as it’s a different experience (one which I’m very familiar with as I had a massive collection before CD’s existed).
All of these things can be done for “hipsterism” (i.e. Presenting an image) or because someone genuinely appreciates certain attributes of a thing.