How do you explain this? Less headroom, lots of nice crackles and scratches. Rumble, wow and flutter. Really? One good thing is that there was always plenty of room for liner notes and photos.
What do you prefer - and more importantly why? Is it pure nostalgia?

Analog is analog. What you record is what you get. Digital uses sampling to approximate the wave curve:

Sampling Rate

CD Audio = 44.1 kHz (samples per second) which at 16 bit means 65,536 possible values.

We could do better ...

DVD Audio = 192 kHz (samples per second). Nice except that DVD audio discs are very rare.

The next point is that an analog output can be fed directly to your amplifier without any Digital to Analog Conversion (DAC). Anyway, whatever the medium, it all comes down to mp3 format played on an iPhone through cheap ear buds so why care?