My experience is similar to yours Jeff: The Jury is still out - they both have their pluses and minuses. The new vinyl LPs I've purchased are mostly very quiet (some have faults that sound like a scratch plus the odd click and pop) but the recording quality to me is very, very good. My old LPs from the 70s and 80s are quite poor due to damage and age - most of my classical vinyl is unplayable. I only added a turnable (Technics SL-1210GAE 55th Anniversary Limited Edition which came with a Nagaoka MM cartridge) plus a pair of Chord phono cables. I'm not sure if my set up is truly analogue as my preamp/dac converts everything that comes in to digital and performs RIAA equalisation in the digital domain before the dac converts the signal back to analogue? The other issue, of course, is the 'provenance' of the regular vinyl (not the pricey audiophile issues put out by MoFi, Analogue Productions etc) we buy these days and whether it's just pressed from a digital master. Some might say if it sounds great - and it does - then who cares. It just means we think it's a binary comparison - analogue versus digital - when it actually isn't that straight forward. However, for now I'm really enjoying the vinyl experience - everything from the wonderful sound to the fact I now listen to the whole album which is something I rarely did with CD and almost never with streaming. At its best, digital can be incredible but it seems to me there's a lot of inconsistency and I often find myself scrambling to turn down the volume because of harshness and digital 'glare', or volume mismatching between tracks/albums, which you just don't get with vinyl. Just listened to Led Zeppelin II on 180g vinyl (remastered by Jimmy Page version), and it put a huge grin of my face!
