Will a $700 turntable outperform a CD player?

Hello,
I agree with Ardsley on the first part. The gun is not the expensive part it’s the bullets or cartridge. MC is right. Vynal  has a personality that is unbeatable as long as you have the right pressing. Which can be very expensive and Sometimes hard to find. Man I would love to have many of these peoples record collections. I have a new Pink Floyd Dark side of the moon and the original Mofi pressing in mint condition. The Mofi will smoke any digital recordings. The new one gets beat by CD everyday. I also have the Mofi CD and the UCD and still the older Mofi record smokes them even if I play the CDs on my Oppo 205 with balanced interconnects. One good pressing can cost $20 minimum. I paid $100 for that Pink Floyd album. You can get CDs really cheep right now and sound really good. If you upgrade your DAC which will help your streaming too then you can get just a transport like the Cambridge.  This will save you a lot of money in analog cables too.I have seen and heard too many people buying a lower end Rega or Project only to spend a lot of money to turn them into the higher end versions. Way more than just buying a good used Rega P6 or P8/10. Save up for the Rega P6 or even better the VPI scout so you can put the money into the recordings rather than the player. Records are the best listening experience as long as you have the right pressing. Who wants to drive a Porsche with a Yugo engine? No one! Am I right MC? Regardless of what you do keep an eye out and try to find some good pressings that are at a good price for the future. Same for the record player and preamp. Good luck! I hope you get where you want to be. 

I can relate to feeling nostalgic and wanting to get back into vinyl.I've got records but my turntable bit the dust long ago.What stops me is listening to my brother's  VPI set up and knowing my Technics table never came close to sounding like that.I'd rather put the money into improving my digital.But still I find myself perusing tables and being tempted often:-)

Re the OP:

In my experience, a $700 turntable, if well sorted, or well set up, will equal or out perform, the best that digital can do or has done so far.

Until they get a better control of the LSB considerations of digital audio, this will always be true.

In order to do that, they’ll have to get their digital thinking in order and redesign the ADC and DAC from the ground up, again, for the umpteenth time.

To do this in conjunction with deep knowledge of how the ear and brain hears (a constantly growing knowledge base, btw...) and make the engineering so it is controlled wholly by such thinking, rather than the other way around.

The latter being how we arrived at this mess that we have today, one where engineering prettiness (i’s dotted, t’s crossed...) is more important that the reality of human hearing, human hearing --which is not looked at by the specialized people doing the ADC/DAC engineering.

We need hugely talented multidisciplinarians in the field of ADC/DAC design, plain and simple. Discovery oriented people, scientists in a multidiciplinarian mode and capacity.

As it all stands today.. (sigh)...a today, where a +$100k digital DAC unit combined with a +$100k ADC on the input end, can’t outperform a few thousand dollars worth of well sorted pure analog record and playback.

In engineering thinking and efforts, the digital system clearly does outperform...but.. with regard to the best in human hearing - it clearly doesn’t.

Major disconnect.

Yay yap yap...the answer is NO. If the question is what format is cheapest to reach a decent sound level that would be digital....if you want out of the box easy, Predictable, again it’s digital....if you want something to build on have some Hobby cash and/or time...vinyl. It’s really not that confusing there’s money to be spent, how much do you wanna spend ? How much time do you want to spend running around to acquire what level of quality. Throw in the nostalgia thing that might make a difference. 

teo_audio, demonstrating that every once in a while the forum proves its worth (I did tighten it up a bit):

In my experience, a $700 turntable, if well sorted, or well set up, will equal or out perform, the best that digital can do or has done so far. ..

Today a +$100k digital DAC unit combined with a +$100k ADC on the input end, can't outperform a few thousand dollars worth of well sorted pure analog record and playback.

In engineering, thinking, and efforts, the digital system clearly does outperform...but.. with regard to the best in human hearing - it clearly doesn't.

Major disconnect.

Indeed.