great vinyl sound cost as much as great cd sound

I just got into vinyl, and I'm very pleased. It's no question for me, given a record and a CD, the record will sound better. Period. I have the same recording on CD and on vinyl from Phillips, the record sounds better. Both formats have advantages and disadvantages, it's all about trade offs. But from an absolute sound perspective, records sound better.

I can't say I've heard the EMM gear, however, dont they convert PCM to SACD and then do the DA conversion? I think the new Teac Esoteric converts SACD into PCM and then does the DA converstion. Sounds like it can go both ways and be successful. I haven't bought into the SACD/DVD-A format so I really can't comment on sound quality here. Just an observation.

A record player will open a larger selection of music for you to choose from. If you get a clean record with a good recording, then the sound will be out of this world if you are use to CD sound. Give it a try so you can hear for yourself. My CD transport is rarely used these days.

Classical music was my driving factor for my turntable. I was really tired of hearing Classical on CDs, and on top of that, selection of classical music is no where near what is available on vinyl.

I use to wonder if vinyl would top my expensive digital front end, until I heard a vinyl rig with a familiar recording I had on CD. There was no comparison, and the vinyl rig was very modest using a vintage turntable and an Ear phono pre ($1200 retail).

Once I actually heard a record played (and it was really nice to hear a recording I had on CD and was very familiar) it was no question, a turntable was in my future. I thought I would start out with a modest turntable, but I ended up going half way up the mountain. I did go for a vacuum platter which is really nice, especially for warped records which play fine now.

On top of that, I've purchased so many used LPs for several dollars a piece that are just amazing recordings. If you get into vinyl, don't forget about getting a record cleaner, this will be important if you want to start buying used records.

CD definately has advantages (primarily convenience at the cost of sound quality) too. There are bad sounding records just like there are bad sounding CDs. But what a turntable does for me is open up a much much larger selection of music than limiting myself to the CD format.

As for SACD or DVD-A, this is even a smaller subset of music than Redbook CD. Granted the sound is better than CD, but how much music is there available? And has Sony dropped SACD all together? I don't know.

What's really on my mind is are we going to see the High Definition video formats go through an ugly battle (BlueRay vs HD-DVD) and both formats fail just like SACD and DVD-A? Let's hope the industry learns from their mistakes.

Markd51: what kind of sleeves do you recommend? I'm new at this cleaning stuff.

I'm also curious as to how important a cartridge is? If one could quantify a percentage of overall pleasure with vinyl playback, what kind of percentage would you give? I'm curious, not knowing what to expect with hi end cartridges?

Markd51 and Dgarretson, thank you for your shared experiences and thoughts on the topics.

I'm really enjoying the DL-103 right now. What are your thoughts as to an exceptional phono cable?

Dave I've been curious about the Audio Consulting stuff...thanks for the pointer.

Markd51 thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts.