Please Educate Me

@woofman - Hard nosed audiophiles are not happy with digital music. You might say serious audiophiles aren’t, but that would cause a heated argument. 

MS Word remains digital when we see and use it, whereupon music ends up analog.  No digital speakers out there that I'm aware of. If there were, they'd still have to move air, so different materials, masses, enclosures,  room characteristics,  etc, etc, will affect sound.

Sorry for the overly critical and angry replies. There's plenty of good experience and advice here...if you don't mind wading through the flaming trolls.

Remember: There is no spoon. :)

Another county heard from. 

Paul McGowan of PS Audio in conversation with John Atkinson of Stereophile, February 28, 2018. The conversation, which has been edited for readability, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0NUvziOgWQ

Atkinson: . . . Putting a disc on, it's like going back to the last century. [Leaning forward, sly grin.] But there's still something right about the sound of a mechanical disc playing in a mechanical player.

McGowan: It sounds better. It sounds better, so far, than any server we've tried. We're working on a server. And we're going to fix that problem. We think that we may know why the physical disc sounds better. Because on the surface, it makes no sense whatsoever. The bits are the same.

Atkinson: Right, they're the same bits being presented to the DAC.

McGowan: Yup, yup. But that's true only insofar as it's ones or zeros. What's different is the timing of the bits, the noise levels [more engineering stuff].

Paul6001,

I was new here not so long ago too. I liken the experience to being a bride’s guest at a wedding where most of the other guests are the groom’s family - and they drink too much and bicker over dinner and end up having a fist fight in the car park. Like that bride’s guest, it is better to watch, not join in.

On your points - I think there are many engineering choices to be made when processing digital information, especially when making the first capture of analogue sound and also when converting it back. There are loads of engineering choices too when the storage medium is a spinning vinyl disc. We hear replicas of the original sound. It is an illusion. The recording engineers, mastering, encoding, and decoding are choice-maker at every stage. You are hearing their choices when things sound different. 
Your listening - if I was you, I’d put together a headphone system for personal listening. Use Roon to benefit from crossfeed filters. Seems like in your NY apartment you will struggle to have a listening room and a living room in the same space. So don’t try. Headphones for personal listening, and some easy listening omni-directional room-filling, guest-pleasing speakers for social listening.  I’m a fan of back-loaded horns because wherever you and guests  sit in your room everyone gets a lovely listen. 
Now, see you soon in the car park where we can watch some of the old boys take their jackets off and start swinging - and missing. 

What a cleverly apt analogy.
Don't forget wedding crashers.
No one is sure who's side they are on, they hurriedly eat and drink too much, and before anyone can confront them, they disappear.