I can't handle digital after analog light my fire

Wow, Elizabeth! My experience is very similar to yours.

After 20 years of exclusive digital listening, I bought a turntable in early 2007. I was so captivated by the difference that I listened to *no* digital music on my system for the next 8 months. Over time I made various upgrades to improve the LP playback, culminating in early 2011 with a Jolida JD9 phono stage and a JD5T line stage. That Jolida line stage uses a solid state (opamp) gain stage with tube buffering. At that point digital music still didn't compete.

In the meantime I changed my focus in digital music from CD player to iTunes on a MacBook. All rips are Apple Lossless and stored on a portable USB drive. Once the music was sourced from the external drive the music sounded less dynammic and involving. Even the iPod Classic playing the same files into my stereo sounded better. Then I got Audirvana Plus music playback software, and configuring it to buffer the music files in RAM and upsampling in multiples of two improved things quite a bit compared to upsampling everything to 24/96, which is the Apple default. But computer playback still wasn't in the league with LP.

Then a couple weeks ago an audiobuddy stopped by with a real tube line stage he wanted to sell. It even had a tube rectifier and a massive transformer. Price was right, especially for how good this sounded. It made my buffered linestage sound 2-dimensional and a little sparse. What really sold me, however, was how the computer-based music now sounded. It sounded liquid, organic, dynamic, and very musically involving. So buying that linestage was like giving me back a library of about 450 digital recordings that I'd had no inclination to listen to.

I haven't really played any CDs through the new line stage; my CD player is a 7-year-old Sony SACD/CD changer. But the MacBook-sourced music sounds killer. Plus, Audirvana can play back FLAC files, so I now have a few 24/96 files from HDTracks, and these are fully competitive with LP, though they trade away a little nuance for lower noise floor and a more sparkling (but no longer irritating) presentation.

Here's something else that's cool--Apple offers a remote control for MacBooks for $20. That's probably next on my list. I can leave the computer on the table while I operate it from the sweet spot.

I *have* heard a $1K CD/SACD player that was very impressive in sounding dynamic and natural--the Marantz SA8004. However, now that asynchronous USB DACs are available at every price point, I think the more cost-effective--and convenient--solution is to put together a laptop-based server with a 3rd-party software solution (e.g., Audirvana Plus, JRMC, Songbird, or Amarra) that:

o Adjusts the upsampling rate to the source sample rate

o Has "hog mode" to turn off unnecessary background processes

o Enables you to buffer the music file to RAM before decoding

Anybody remember the Genesis Digital Time Lens? That was an $1100 component that provided 512K RAM to buffer the digital data stream before reclocking it to the DAC. Today, for $50 Audirvana Plus enables you to buffer up to 7.9 GB in RAM, turn off the background processes, AND control the up sampling algorithm.

Even without an external DAC, these improvements are significant, and all of them bypass the jitter encoded in many CD pressings plus the jitter that comes from reading the CD. Add an asynchronous USB DAC and you can get high quality jitter-free decoding as well, not to mention all the music server convenience features hosted on a laptop.