Bernard23 makes some very important observations. I'd like to amplify on his comments, especially his closing sentences:
Music is an emotional process, often invoking memories of a past time and place, and the click, pops and (barely audible) rumble are part of that soundtrack. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the older you get, the more relevant your memory becomes, and occasionally it's less important that it's the ground truth. A bit of coloration is great, providing you realise that's what it is; like most things in life really.
All of us like to think of ourselves as being able to respond neutrally to inputs from the world that we inhabit. We believe that we're actually objective observers. And that is, of course, not true at all.
In terms of objective qualities, we all have physical limitations. Even those with the best of hearing have some limitations. No one can really hear anything above about 20kHz. If we're older, hearing loss sets in well below 20kHz. And we also don't perceive low-frequency signals as well as we do midrange frequencies.
Those are just the simple physical limitations. More important is the brain processing. Our brains assemble auditory inputs into what we perceive as tones. That complex process of assembling tones isn't itself neutral.
We make sense of auditory inputs using a vast amount of information in our brains, including information that might seem to have nothing to do with the actual auditory inputs themselves.
Let me offer a couple of examples from my life:
1. In early 1983, during one of the several poverty-stricken periods of my life, a friend gave me a free television--an old Japanese 13-inch black-and-white television with a busted antenna. When she gave it to me, she said, "The speaker got wet somehow one time, and it doesn't sound right." And she was right. When I first got the TV, I had a hard time understanding anything issuing from the speaker. But within a few weeks, I could understand it just fine.
My girlfriend (later wife) had the same experience. At first, she'd say, "What are they saying? What are they saying?" Then she was able to understand everything just fine.
If we watched TV with friends, they'd say, "What are they saying?!?!" And we'd interpret.
Our brains had learned to make sense of the distorted signals from the damaged speaker.
2. I'm 65. I know that I am essentially deaf to tones above 8kHz. Oh, I can very faintly hear isolated tones up to 14kHz if they're loud enough; but I can't hear them if any other sounds are present. I have significant, constant tinnitus. And I often have trouble hearing conversations in noisy situations.
My youngest is now fourteen years old. She has excellent hearing. We have been out, and I have heard songs playing. I'll say, "Hey, listen to that! They're playing [so-and-so]." And she will have to struggle to pick out the song--despite the fact that her hearing is significantly better than mine. She can no doubt hear the same tones. But she isn't familiar with the songs, so she can't pick the tones of the song out of the background tones and assemble them into something meaningful.
When any of us listens to music (or anything else), we are bringing to the experience a very significant amount of information already available in our brains. And that information includes all sorts of emotional values. (And there's no clean distinction between "reason" and "emotion" anyway. Those are terms that we apply to neural processes that can't be readily distinguished from one another. As the great poet Theodore Roethke wrote, "We think by feeling. What is there to know?")
What does all this have to do with listening to vinyl?
Let me speak only for myself.
When I spin a record, I am not listening simply to the tones issuing from the speaker. I am bringing to the experience a host of memories and attitudes, including attitudes toward vinyl in general, toward the particular disk that I'm playing, toward the equipment I'm using, and toward the entire environment in which the experience is occurring. That host of memories and attitudes is a significant part--perhaps the most significant part--in constructing my current experience.
Another anecdote: This past Saturday, I bought a couple of kind of junker turntables, one of which is a Realistic Lab-50, a lower-end belt-drive changer made by BSR. I had to clean up some goo, install a new belt, and install a new stylus. (The cartridge is a Realistic-branded Shure.) Then I dropped the needle on an album.
It sounded great.
I know that a significant part of the pleasure that I took from the experience derived from the fact that I had rescued a junker turntable. I also took pleasure in the experience because of the drive I made to pick up the turntable. After I put the turntable (and a junker BIC) in my car, I helped a couple of gentlemen loosen the lug nuts on the car next to mine in the parking lot. They were nice guys, and I felt good that I could help them. As I listened to the album, I was also thinking about sending a video of the changer at work to my brother and a friend, both of whom also love old turntables. I knew that they'd enjoy the video and enjoy learning about how I'd gotten a decent working changer for an investment of little more than $12.50.
I can offer a host of examples of similar experiences that tell me, at least, that a great deal of how I hear any piece of music is tied up with all sorts of memories and attitudes. I think that's true for all of us. And I think that's why some people can listen to an expensive system with objectively subpar performance and still deem the system to be superb.
In short, none of us is a truly objective listener.
We actively create a very significant portion of our listening experiences. And we cannot readily subtract from any experience the sum (or, speaking mathematically, perhaps the product) of the host of preexisting attitudes and memories that we bring to the experience.
For a good recent book on the general topic of consciousness and the role of our brains in creating our experienced environments, see Anil Seth,
Being You. https://www.anilseth.com/being-you/