Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were

Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering. For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.