Vinyl can sound very good in spite of it's various 'minor' problems (eg. noisy surfaces, inner groove distortion) but what bothers me most is it's pitch instability (non-concentric records). Having heard the rock solid pitch stability of digital, I found it frustrating to listen to my records even though my VPI HW19 Mk IV with Graham 1.5T arm is a very decent front end. Since I do have a large collection of records, I had to decide whether to give up on them or get the only TT that addresses this problem with records - a Nakamichi (in my case a Dragon-CT, about $3000 on ebay). I bought one and am happy with it. It's a very fine TT that does truly solve the problem (I'm a musician and apparently bothered by this problem more than most listeners). But, had I not a large collection of records I wouldn't consider getting a TT and beginning to acquire records. Ovbviously we all hear differently. What I hear with my system is sound as satisfying with digital as it is with vinyl. A somewhat different presentation, but at least as satisfying. I'm talking about plain red-book CDs. And this kind of reproduction doesn't require an exotic player. Use almost any player with digital-out and invest less than $1000 in a good DAC - say a Benchmark or Lavry - and you should have wonderful sound from any decently recorded CDs. Perhaps I should qualify that by saying that I listen to classical music almost exclusively, so don't know from experience if other genres of music have been as well recorded (but not perfectly!). But if they are, I see no reason to get into the analog domain, since you don't even have a record collection to listen to. Good luck and happy listening, whatever you decide to do.
