For a while, Mr. Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. “The sound quality didn’t matter at all,” he said. “Just the music.”

But Mr. Svizeny’s attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father’s collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. “I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it’s lost value to me,” Mr. Svizeny said. “I’d rather hold a physical thing.”

With vinyl, he added, “You’re experiencing music in a different way.”

Mr. Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to “abandoning” iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the “Easter egg hunt” of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys’ bearded phase.

In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Mr. Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. “I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn’t on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube,” he said. “It sounded so bad.”

He laughed at his own fussiness, but added, “I didn’t even want to listen anymore.”

As for home audio equipment, Mr. Svizeny owns what he considers an average Sony turntable, receiver and speakers, while Mr. Damski uses his roommate’s Audio-Technica model. But both men hope to acquire a high-end system someday.

“If I own a house and have disposable income, a good stereo will be a primary investment,” Mr. Damski said. “Definitely higher on the list than bath towels.”

For years, the typical high-end audio customer has been a white-haired classical music aficionado or an aging rock fan for whom listening to “Aja” in 1977 on a pair of Altec Lansings was a spiritual experience.