But that's still a strange concept of "rational."
Rationality is essentially the coherence between your desires beliefs and actions. That is, you have a desire/goal and rationality is how you reason toward what action is likely to achieve that goal, based on your beliefs.
So if you felt like drinking a can of coke, and you believed the only place in your home where there was a can of coke was in your fridge, then it's a rational act to go to the fridge and get the coke to fulfill that desire.
But if you instead walked outside to your backyard, where you knew there was no coke, to get the coke, THAT would be irrational.
Or if you believed there wasn't a coke in your fridge, but you still went to the fridge to get a coke. THAT would be irrational.
Rational actions are based on fulfilling desires/goals, and all desires are subjective as the starting poine, so you are always doing things "based on what you like/want/desire."
If for instance your goal is to achieve as much sonic accuracy as possible, then that's a value judgement of your own, something you like or want to achieve. Then choosing something like digital sources over vinyl will be the more rational action to achieve that desire. But at bottom, there is not Law Written In To The Fabric Of The Universe that "accuracy is to be sought in music playback sources!" That's a value judgement or personal desire you start with, and others may share.
If your goal is NOT accuracy per se, but that you like some of the aspects of vinyl - the physicality, the artwork, turntables are cool to you, it maybe changes the way you listen etc - then the act of buying a turntable and vinyl is the rational choice. It would be irrational to choose streaming digital, since that does not actually meet your desire/goal. It would be like desiring to eat the salmon main course on a menu, looking to fulfill that desire, but ordering the steak instead. That's irrational.
So there is no fundamental way in which buying digital music is "rational" and NOT based on feelings/desires, where buying vinyl isn't rational because it is only based on feelings/desires. Both start from wanting to satisfy some feeling/desire.
I see this different. First lets define the goal(s).
1) listen to music (main goal)
2) listen to music in an accurate way(secundary goal)
3) fullfill goal 1) and 2) as cheap and effortless as possible.
Thats complete rational. Like buying a car for everyday usage. Define the requierements. Look for a solution that fullfills this requirements in an econonmic way.
Its easy to see that with this goals in mind vinyl has no rational justification.
You need to add goals to make it rational .
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