Help me stay with Vinyl.


Please, help direct me towards good sources of clean vinyl.  
As an emerging Jazz fan, I wish not to go to the dark side of digital.  Love my tube, all-analog system, but the cost of good, clean sounding, vinyl is getting to me.  
I need some guidance.


lndryguru
I get  most of my vinyl from Acoustic Sounds; never had a complaint. All the digital guys talk about how digital has gotten "better" recently. Fine, but it will never be a real time linear reproducer like vinyl is; it will always be little chops of zeros and ones. If we had digital ears digital reproduction would be superior but that's not what we're dealing with. I do have more cd's than records, but I keep a log of time on my gear, mostly for tube time of use, and my log shows more than twice the hours with analog than digital.

tomic601

I also do well at discogs.

after the page comes up, click/sort on the word 'condition'
then, down the list untill ......

https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/9824525?sort=condition%2Cdesc&ev=rb
Equipment, phono settings, cables and cartridge make a huge difference on the amount of noise you hear.  My first system was an old Krell phono/pre, Clearaudio Moving Coil, and Krell amp.  This setup had a soundstage that wrapped around me 270 degrees, was from the floor to the ceiling, and a couple of city blocks deep.  The sound was crystal clear unlike anything I have ever heard, then or since.  It also reproduced every pop and tick with supreme enjoyment and the groove noise sounded like surf on the beach.  I enjoy my vinyl almost 50% of the time with CD's and streaming splitting the rest.  The stylus size must be small to avoid previous groove wear.  I am currently using a Benz Micro Wood SL that I bought rebuilt on Agon, using the 400 ohm setting and a Clearaudio Charisma MM cart, and I am playing records I felt were too noisy with great enjoyment.  Good Luck.
Also, I clean my records with a Nitti Gritti machine and use an Anti Static brush from Maple Shade. I have cleaned records multiple times with poor results because I played them with the same stylus shape that caused the damage to begin with.  IE elliptical versus Shibata or Ridge Line.  When I changed the stylus shape much of the noise disappeared.  Also, I've bought quite a few records from Music Stack with good results.
I agree with some of the other posters. Digital audio has progressed to a point that it is very competitive with vinyl. To my ears, they both have wonderful traits that are just different. They will never sound the same no matter how much money you throw at either format.

I still have a nice vinyl rig and love spinning records. But streaming my files from a NAS or Quobuz from the internet sounds mighty fine. You shouldn't limit yourself to one format, you lose out on a lot of good music when you do.

Oz