I'm all for vinyl for nostalgic or visual art reasons, but trying to play the audio quality card seems like obvious bullshit to me. If you were collecting music media based strictly on quality, you'd collect CDs. They can handle a higher Kbps, don't become slowly destroyed in the process of being played, don't warp in bad conditions, and are easier to transport.

First of all, a 96-whatever Kbps that is like a mid-quality mp3 is probably more info than your (the general public you, not YOU you) Beatz by Dre headphones can replicate anyway, not to mention your tinny laptop speakers or Bluetooth jambox. Even if you have studio quality speakers and cabling, you're probably not listening close enough to notice a difference.

Also at question is the genre of music- if you're listening to computer based digital music anyway, the extended frequencies and overtones the are captured by greater data rates aren't even created in the original studio captures. Grungy rock amps probably don't either. Acoustic music, or live vocals, benefit most from better quality, but there will probably never be enough data or capture ability (in our lifetime, I should add) to genuinely recreate a live sound. Recording fundamentally changes the experience anyway, and stripping some of those overtones is a consequence of that.

The best example of this I have is organ music: electric organs use prerecord samples, which can be extremely high quality and very, very good sounding. Recordings of real organs can capture nearly all of the measurable frequencies. Yet both electric organs and recordings of organ music generally bore me, where a live organ recital can be absolutely thrilling. I think there's something about the experience more than just frequencies; with the organ you can feel the rush of the air and feel the vibrations in the room. It isn't replicable, except for possibly by newer electric/acoustic hybrid technologies which are attempting to get the best of both worlds.

This article does get right the emotional importance of repetition, which is why we feel so strongly about music from our college days and not necessarily new music we like but are less familiar with. The ease and ubiquity of music provided by streaming is maybe an issue in really enjoying music, but we still seem to manage to enjoy new things sometimes, because really good stuff (or stuff we like) will eventually stick.