bdp24, Well said and mirrors my thoughts exactly. I also tend to agree with Steve's position, at least it reflects my feelings.
I put together a near SOTA system in the 80's (not because I was smart but because I could) and found that early digital was unlistenable however, unfortunately concurrently, LP's quality had degenerated to a point that I was not buying either new digital or analog (and didn't have the knowledge or intelligence to buy up used LP's becoming available). Then I got a good CDP and some good recordings (performances and recordings) and I finally had access to lots of music that I had missed and the musical content of my digital collection quickly exceeded my LP collection (substantially) and the quality quickly challenged the analog system.
Ultimately I found that maintaining (and using) a vinyl recording system was too time consuming, fussy, and although often the results were far superior to my digital it was, for me, counter productive to use the analog stuff any longer. So I gave it away, everything, and went strictly to digital. And without the analog any longer I found that I was able to focus on, and improve, my digital system as well.
For those reasons I agree with Steve. I'm a happy camper now and I'm pretty much back where I started, trying to focus on the music. I still respect the 'audio' aspects but not so much. :-)
