I agree with Viridian. Too often on this site, people discuss sound instead of music. As he says, and I would add unfortunately, there are too many great recordings that are only on CD, so I did go ahead and buy a CD player, though I didn't spend $3000, I bought the Rega Apollo for almost a third of that total.
That said, I do agree that digital, though improving as some have noted, will never equal analog in quality. So I continue to buy records at least 90% of the time. Being a professional classical musician, most of my listening is to classical and jazz, and as I have said on a couple of other threads, they simply recorded things better back then in the exclusively analog era. Those recordings are often just as musically satisfying as today's digital releases, and often more so. The technical proficiency of most musicians coming out of conservatories today is much higher even than it was 20-30 years ago, but their musicianship is not correspondingly improved, and conductors are not getting any better either, especially here in the states. But I'm getting way off topic, so I'll shut up now.
