I believe the driving force of this phenomena is nostalgia and envy of the experiences that those older than you had. I don't think actual superiority makes an

I believe the driving force of this phenomena is nostalgia and envy of the experiences that those older than you had. I don't think actual superiority makes any sense at all, because during the early days of CDs they were mastered well and sounded amazing; The Dark Side of the Moon is an album that hasn't embraced the loudness wars and it's clearly superior to tape or vinyl. But if you really like some "historic" band that your elders got to listen to on the radio and go to their shows as they were coming up, and listen to their albums as they were released, you're never going to be able to have those experiences. But you can listen to them on the same format that they originally released their work. It might be argued that the band, producer, studio, mastering guys, etc would have optimized the album for the media it was originally released on, but I suspect that the differences are fairly small. As your ability to reproduce sound gets better, no information is lost. It's lost during mastering for a lower fidelity medium, not in the transfer from a lower fidelity medium to a higher one. This is a psychological phenomena not a technical one.