Lo-fi and the specific sonic qualities that define different eras of the aesthetic are worth distinguishing.

The lo-fi of the 80s underground — four-track recordings, boombox aesthetics, the cassette culture of small-scale independent music — has a different sound quality from the lo-fi that emerged in the mid-2000s internet age, which has a different sound from the contemporary bedroom pop aesthetic. These are all "lo-fi" but the technical constraints that produced each of them were different, and the differences are audible.

The 80s underground lo-fi is defined by the limitations of the four-track cassette recorder — the noise floor, the frequency response ceiling, the specific saturation of analog tape run slightly too hot. The contemporary bedroom pop lo-fi is more likely to be a deliberate digital recreation of those qualities — lo-fi as a choice rather than a constraint.

I find the original more interesting precisely because the constraints were real. When limitation produces character, the character has a specificity that recreation can approximate but not quite replicate.