I think that some people respond to vinyl and some don't see it. The only way is to try it yourself, but I don't think you need to spend a ton of money up front. When I decided to get back into vinyl, I purchased a Music Hall MMF-5 table for about $700 and a Music Hall Phono stage for about $125. I compared it to my $10K digital player and, despite the the 10/1 price ratio, I immediately recognized analog's virtues. I now have a significantly more expensive vinyl setup, and I feel the improvements are commensurate with the cost, but I still think that little Music Hall was good enough to hear what was going on. So I recommend you spend $1000 or so and find out if you like it. Worst case - you'll dump it for $500-$600 and chalk it up to experience. IMO.
Analog vs Digital Confusion
Thinking about adding Analog to my system, specifically a Turntable, budget is about 5K but I'm having some second thoughts and I'm hoping someone can help, specifically, how can the record sound better? Scenario; an album is released in both CD and Record, the recording is DDD mixed, mastered, etc in the digital domain. It seems to me that to make the master record the process would involve taking the digital recoding and adding an additional D/A process to cut the record? So, bottom line, how can the record sound better than the CD played on compitent CDP?