Sell quality turntable to buy top CD player?
What about the all-new Rega Saturn-R CD player (roughly $3,000 US). It comes with a built-in DAC should you ever decide to get into digital downloads or invest in a digital streamer/player. http://the-ear.net/review-hardware/rega-saturn-r-cd-playerdac |
I have a large vinyl collection, to me at least. About a thousand. CD's around 500.The vinyl sounds better with more variance between recordings. Almost gave up on it though. That said, It would be a reach to say it would be worth it to put together a vinyl collection and a vinyl rig from scratch today. The advice from those above who know digital seems the most prudent thing to follow, but I personally listen to very few CDs. But the vinyl rig was 12K. |
Dentdog, good comments. You touched on something most of us who have gone all digital think about frequently. If one were starting from scratch (no pun intended) with a 5K budget for a source, would one do better with a vinyl set up or with one of the high quality/high value digital systems, like a Modwright Oppo 105 or Modwright Sony HAPZ1? I dearly loved vinyl. I never owned a cassette deck or reel to reel machine. The transition to digital back in 83 was driven by one consideration-- Money! My entire rig was worth about $1200, I had a vinyl collection < 100, and I thought I could do better going with a CD system. It was probably the correct choice. Resetting the clock to 2014, I think we are starting to understand how to do digital right. Over the last few years, the emotional element has returned to my listening in a very strong way. This is something that was largely absent in my listening during the period from 84 to 09. I've had the pleasure of using a source that doesn't scream digital, and has all the virtues of digital- S/N, dynamic range, absent vinyl noise, etc. For this reason, and because I now have a CD collection of ~ 1500, and because of the extensive availability of classical music on CD, digital remains the better choice. As far as sound quality, I can't argue how a $5K investment in tt, arm, cartridge, and phono pre would stack up against my recently modded ModWright HAPZ1 or MW Sony 5400. Its an experimental question, which I am not really motivated to answer. It would seem the OP went through the same analysis and came to the same conclusion. I think it is good that this thread has been largely devoid of dogmatically derived answers. Let the music answer the question. |
