35 yrs ago I had a fully vinyl rig set up to compete with a heavily modded magnavox player du jour (which did sound way better than other players of the day). I had many vinyl/CD repeats and auditioned them extensively, one after the other (through a big tube amp & Vandersteen 4 speakers). Digital always sounded different from vinyl in way described above, and to my ears, vinyl usually sounded better. But it was easy to see the vinyl recession that would follow--vinyl would no longer be ascendant.
I formed an opinion then that still holds up, though my audio gear is vastly different today: that is, if I had a vinyl system, I would put serious $$ into the TT & cartridge, also the phono preamp--because the extra outlay could be heard relatively easily. But with digital, I would keep it mid-level, never plunging on the big-$$ brands of the moment. Beyond making sure the cables were good quality, I'd upgrade players from time to time, rather than going for any one SOTA player.
And so it is today in my desktop audio system. No vinyl here (no room). I use DACs pretty much as I did CD players back in the day. I'm fond of non-oversampling (NOS) multibit DACs & am on my 2nd. Its sound is very fine for digital (MHDT Labs Orchid @$700). I have no urge to upgrade. My passive studio monitors are very high resolution & sound wonderful to me in the current setup. I listen to a lot of streaming music, also 100s of GBs of music I ripped to the HD.
One thing I would certainly try if I had a vinyl front-end (1500 LPs in storage) is to rip vinyl recordings to disk, then output through DAC + speakers. That would be very interesting, to see if the positive attributes of vinyl survive digitization.
I formed an opinion then that still holds up, though my audio gear is vastly different today: that is, if I had a vinyl system, I would put serious $$ into the TT & cartridge, also the phono preamp--because the extra outlay could be heard relatively easily. But with digital, I would keep it mid-level, never plunging on the big-$$ brands of the moment. Beyond making sure the cables were good quality, I'd upgrade players from time to time, rather than going for any one SOTA player.
And so it is today in my desktop audio system. No vinyl here (no room). I use DACs pretty much as I did CD players back in the day. I'm fond of non-oversampling (NOS) multibit DACs & am on my 2nd. Its sound is very fine for digital (MHDT Labs Orchid @$700). I have no urge to upgrade. My passive studio monitors are very high resolution & sound wonderful to me in the current setup. I listen to a lot of streaming music, also 100s of GBs of music I ripped to the HD.
One thing I would certainly try if I had a vinyl front-end (1500 LPs in storage) is to rip vinyl recordings to disk, then output through DAC + speakers. That would be very interesting, to see if the positive attributes of vinyl survive digitization.