Wanna take it to the next level? Buy MORE speakers!

This issue with a more solid "meat on the bones" sound, and a sense that everything is dead solid perfect with golden age analog is fascinating to me because it's hard to know for sure why this is. We can look at the signal that was originally coming off the mic, and then see what happens by the time it's been laid down on vinyl, and it has been changed a lot. I read somebody talking about listening to test tones on vinyl. Simple, single sine wave test tones. They reported that the same tone on vinyl sounded nicer than when played through digital. How can that be when it's just a single tone sinewave? Can the digital really be messing that up, somehow making it sound thin and lacking? Looking on a scope revealed very significant amount of harmonic distortion and noise on the sinewave coming off the vinyl. It had been considerably embellished, and sounded nicer as a result. I think this is perhaps a happy accident. Sound coming from just two sources in a room when it's supposed to present an entire sound field is inherently lacking, and may perceptually benefit from some kinds of enrichment. There's also interesting cases where some noise can actually help us hear, or see better, allowing our minds to fill in what's missing. 

I've been looking for an example of this I found once that showed text that was very hard to read until random noise was added. I've run in to problems with a lack of noise on images that I stacked in an attempt to get rid of all noise in the shadows. The result is obvious banding in the shadows if you look closely. That's a digital issue but it'd probably be an analog issue to if it was possible to get the noise super low on an analog print that didn't have fine enough film grain. Film just doesn't work that way so it's not possible.  Analog has very fine resolution, but it's not all filled with real signal off the microphone because that gets smeared away beyond a certain resolution, which is usually lower than what digital can do. But the noise and distortion is being created in real time during playback, with the noise at a much higher resolution both in terms of timing and level. In the golden age they were only listening to that kind of playback, and so everything was optimized with those effects in play.

I read a long article about high resolution sound, and the guy in charge of re-mastering was saying that no analog is, by the definitions they had come up with,  capable of high resolution. Yet they convert master tapes to something crazy like 192 kHz 32 bit, and it's mostly  just recording a bunch of noise from the tape head at high resolution. But maybe that's the point!

Just thinking here, not making any claims with absolute certainty.

Mark "Disruptor" Levinson fixed all of this for ya. The official studio master for anything that got released in the past 20 30 years is a hires digital file. There's no tape anywhere...You convert that file with Daniel Hertz's Master Class software and you will get what you tend to perceive with analog mastertape (if that's what you desire). After that, might you need to think about CD, Vinyl, etc? You don't really...

Ok, if you have a sentimental SACD collection , maybe you'd like to keep a SACD player around... 

A cheap way to add fun to your hi-fi is to get one of the inexpensive surround sound boxes containing the Dynaquad system. David Hafler was a big fan, and offered a couple of different Dynaco boxes to create a rear channel signal. All the circuit does is create a left minus right signal and send it to a pair of rear channel speakers. If a recording was made in a large hall/cathedral/etc, the left/right stereo recording can contain out-of-phase (left minus right) information, consisting largely of hall ambiance.

Even with "mere" 2-channel recordings, a Hafler-derived rear soundfield can be quite enveloping. You hear the stage, instruments, and singers in front of you, and the sound of the venue all around you. It’s just for fun, no need to get all purist about it.

@deep_333  To me the phrase "awful multichannel setup" is redundant. Yes, I suppose a music surround system can be initially impressive, especially to the novice listener, but does anyone really want to be subjected to musical inaccuracy in the long term? Some people think door-rattling one-note bass in their cars is impressive but you may notice the windows are usually down because the drivers are suffering from listening fatigue. To each his own, what is great to some is "awful" to others and discern no fun in it at all. Let's be better than victims of more-is-better salesmanship.

Given the same budget for speakers, 2 speakers will sound better than multiple speakers. 

There is no free lunch.

If one has a budget, let's say, $10K for speakers, and they spend on 4+ speakers instead of 2, the quality and engineering on every aspect of the speakers will be most likely be diminished. 

Cheap crossover parts, inferior cabinet material and bracing, inferior drivers, less time and effort on R&D, etc, all add up to inferior sounding speakers. Adding more of the same quality does not make it sound better. More impressive maybe, but not qualitatively better. 

If you ever want to test this, pick up a pair of cheap used speakers, open them up and add some bracing, some Black Hole 5, swap out the cheap crossover parts (iron core coils, sand cast resistors, electrolytic caps) with better quality of the same values. And revel the improved sound quality. 

Most mainstream manufacturers don't put any money into these things, because they do not show from the outside, so consumers don't see them. 

Even some people that should know better, are often taken in by great looking enclosures and marketing. Just look at all the great press those crappy new SVS speakers are getting.