That's what I hear. Sure, the digitized music nowadays sounds clear, but it doesn't have that distinct character that is recognizable via vinyl. Plus, the album is pretty much extinct as well. Hardly anyone buys an album and enjoys every song from beginning to end like they used to. Now it's just emphasis on the favorite song. I tend to be guilty in that regard on occasion, but I do love albums, and to this day still buy the CD over the MP3 any day of the week. Such is the case of "The Hunter" by Mastodon. Every song on there blows me away and the sequence of them makes it an experience.
Alas, I'm digressing at this point. What I'm getting at is that the digital age has changed the way we listen to music. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. But this guy does wish we could go back in time on occasion.
Glad I'm not the only one that sees things that way.
Making albums seems to have become a lost art as of late. I've always seen them as a singular piece of artist interpretation not necessarily pertaining specifically to a singular concept, but rather creative and intelligent perspective for whatever that artist collectively conjured up at the time.
The possibilities of projection are virtually limitless with what can be created musically and also artistically with the album art and even the manner in which it's presented from it's package. A good example of that would be Tool's 10,000 days album with the built in spyglass for the art booklet making images which would otherwise be odd or obscure come alive and hold this vague sense of telling a story.
But unfortunately, modernized methods of perfecting recording quality is one thing, but with digital distribution mediums taking over the need for physical objects of media tend to favor the concept of making singles repeatedly rather than whole packages which tend to better retain an idea or process of imagination more so than a single song ever can. Sad times these are.