>All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment. This I agree fully with. However, this is also (IMHO) part of vi

>All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment. This I agree fully with. However, this is also (IMHO) part of vinyl's challenge - the entry cost for getting blow-me-away-results is much, much higher than for a digital system. Now, assuming we use the same speakers (Which, if anything, is the one link in the chain where one should put the most of one's budget!) and amps and are left only with the source part: You can get an excellent DAC for a couple of hundred dollars. If you want something top-of-the-line, inarguably reference-grade, that'll set you back a couple of kilobucks. (There are lots of more expensive DACs; however, at $2k or thereabouts, the Benchmark DAC2 hardly leaves any room for improvement in other factors than user interface and bragging rights.) As for source - with the DAC sorted, you can use just about anything. Laptop. Old CD-player with a digital output. Anything will do. Total cost (excluding amps/speakers) for a reference-grade system: $2,100 or so. For a system which gets you 99% of the way there - $300 or so. (Obviously, these are very rough ballpark figures, intended to stress the point more than anything else.) So, how does the analog side of things look? Good LP players cannot by their very nature be very cheap; there's simply too much precision mechanics about. So, let us say that a 'very good' LP player is the Linn LP12 with no upgrades. That alone appears to set you back in excess of $3k, luckily including what I assume to be a decent, though not stellar pickup. Adding to that, you need a RIAA preamp; disregard the cheapest ones - look inside, and all you'll find is an op-amp, a voltage regulator and a simple second-order filter. Say, (I am just guessing here, having built my own RIAA preamp years ago) - $500-1,000 will get you up from the basic designs and into the realm of things which can do the LP12 justice. Grand total - $3,500-4,000. So, twice the cost of the digital reference - and this is still a -by audiophile standards- very basic analog system with lots of room for improvement. Also, chances are the $300 digital system will run circles around it - even more so if you buy some cheap DSP plugins which can emulate the characteristics of LP playback, giving you an experience closer to what vinyl would sound like. That being said, I fully understand the people who appreciate the tinkering potential of analog systems; you can mix and match accessories and components to a much larger degree than in digital systems, adjust various properties (needle weight; tracking force &c) all influencing the sound; however, when you do that (I do!) you are not necessarily doing it for the sake of faithful reproduction, but rather as a very expensive, very limited way of doing EQ. (Best investment I ever made to my hifi-system: A four-band parametric EQ unit. Sorry, all hardcore audiophiles.)