How Much To Rival Good Digital Playback

Psychicanimal, the 1200 will only get you awesome mid-bass, lots of it, will little refinement.

Not my modded creature.

So thats whats going on...duh. Every time I hear a turntable now, doing a sole piano, it sounds out of tune to varying degrees depending on the quality of the table. With a full band playing it of course is not really noticable. At least not with a few drinks.

My ears must have become accustomed to the pitch accuracy of digital such that now I can hear pitch errors that I never noticed in my youth. Same with surface noise, I never paid it much mind way back then but now if the record is not really clean it ruins the enjoyment. Thank goodness for the record-cleaning machines.

RPL, I said that about pitch in an earlier post in this thread:

The people that push for analog, even with cheap rigs, ALWAYS omit the fact that digital has PERFECT pitch. I can infer that they can't hear differences in pitch...

I don't think this is question is presented correctly. Sound quality has nothing, or almost nothing to do with money. One can spend 5 thousand on very good components that just would not work together, while smartly spending 6-8 hundred would make a world of a difference.
But getting back to the original question, I would say that between table, arm, cartridge and RIAA corrector one has to spend between 15 and 20 hundred to beat almost any off-the-shelf CD player.