So I just finished reading a fantastic little piece of nonfiction called Perfecting Sound Forever and I highly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in recorded sound. Greg Milner follows the history of recorded sound and the contentious debates that continue to surround it. On the way he touches on critical theory, psychoacoustics, war profiteering, music criticism, media theory, a little bit of Adorno, and some old fashioned fanboy gushing (Pavement get's mentioned a couple times). I think this book is actually every one of my geeky interests rolled up into one single serving. Milner is not so secretly an analog enthusiast but he's quick to point out the wild eyed doomsdaying and magical thinking endemic to certain analog purists.
One of the most important things I've taken away from the book is the idea that the trajectory of musical technology was not preordained. There has always been a push towards high fidelity, having the purest representation of a sonic event, as well as a push for innovation, for creating new sounds with new technology. It's a classic example of a tool built for observation having irrevocable effects on what it observes. It's also always been a contentious subject, every new technology having it's utopian boosters and dystopian naysayers. This ongoing battle hit a fever pitch with the advent of CDs. What's most depressing about the CD chapter of the book isn't that so many people thought digital audio sounded terrible (a lot of people still feel this way) but that it was spurred by an industry desire for a format change. Neither artists/producers nor consumers were clamoring for a better format, and many of them thought it was a useless ploy. I always assumed that analog purism was something that came later, an old guy nostalgia but also a punk rock fuck you to a once very expensive medium. I didn't realize that digital audio was a contentious subject from day one. Also, the technical standards of CDs (bit depth, sampling rate) were sort of rushed into use. That is, CDs could have been more hi-def given a couple more months in development. And of course the greatest irony of all, that digitizing music would eventually be the industry's undoing.
This got me thinking about the current Tape/Vinyl revivalism. I'll admit that the most annoying trait about format fetishism is the built in nostalgia. You kinda wanna shake these people and scream "Get with it, things change, stop trying to escape into the past. The future is..." you get the point. But, there's actually a foward looking element in all this nostalgia. Becuase you don't have to listen to records and you don't have to put them out, doing either is a conscious act, a rebellion against the norm. It can seem like a pointless rebellion but it's not just empty posturing. It's also not an anti-social behavior. It creates spaces of cultural exchange where there are alternatives to the convenient and disposable (or just fickle) nature of pop culture. Although it smacks of a fad, I think it really stems from a desire for community, the very same same desire that fuels webforums and blogs.
The debate for me isn't just about sound quality. Yes, I think records sound more musical and therefore better. But it's also about having the artifact, the fetish object. Yes, it's conspicuous consumption, no it's not very "green," it's more expensive/not free (This debate could go in circles though. How much energy does it take to make an Ipod? How much did that Ipod cost? Who get's that money?). But I buy a record, the band makes some money, the label that put out their album makes some money, the record store makes some money, I get something permanent and usually desirable in exchange. It seems so quaint doesn't it? Consumerism that doesn't feel like consumerism.
Far be it from me to say this is the only way to listen or to be actively engaged with music. But it is effective and actually quite rewarding. And it's thriving, which is something the industry as a whole is certainly not doing. Polemics aside, it's a continually interesting phenomenon, especially as it consistently confounds so many people who try to shrug it off. 
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