great vinyl sound cost as much as great cd sound

I have a highly customized battery-powered Sony SCD-1 that I believe rivals EMM, and a VPI TNT/Graham/Lyra/BAT vinyl combo that's up there. I believe that RBCD playback is absolutely unforgiving of even minor flaws in the digital front end & the labors of Hercules are necessary to get digital beyond the point of mere listenability. The CDP needs to get damned close to state-of-the-art for one to suspend critical judgment of the medium. Vinyl, on the other hand, is more forgiving to the ear of minor technical imperfections. It's possible to pay $5-$10,000 for a vinyl combo that satisfies short of state-of-the-art, but gets deep enough into the pleasure zone to forget about the horse race. From that point it's all about finding a good used record store where one can practice the art of collecting.

Dave

Karmapolice

I have OK Computer on vinyl and it sounds great.

james1969

I have a 1st generation Hovland phono cable w/XLRs that is very nice. I understand the newer Hovland Musicgroove is also up there. If I were doing it again, I would DIY a nice phono cable with Audio Consulting silver wire drawn thru natural cotton sleeves (both from Reference Audio Mods) with a Tiffany DIN. The natural cotton has a lower dialectric constant than teflon and produces the most amazingly open and pure sound. About $15 per cable pair foot.

Dave

IMO opinion an expensive hi-end cartridge is wasted on a lesser arm/TT/phono stage combo. Given budget constraints it's probably better to put long money into a great arm/TT that will last in your system & start with a fairly basic cartridge. Since cartridges wear out anyway, one has ample opportunity to upgrade them.

Awhile back I bought a used SME IV/Oracle Dephi III and put in a Sumiko Blue Point Special. I had really good sound for $1200 total investment. I later replaced the BPS with a better Audioquest NSX7000 Fe5 cartridge, but couldn't really coax too much more from the better cartridge until moving to a better VPI TNT/Graham setup. With the VPI/Graham, I could really hear the difference in cartridges and even more so later on when upgrading to a Lyra Helikon. But still, the difference between my first and last vinyl rigs is not night-and-day like between good & great digital front ends.

Dave