Would I be wasting my money to get a turntable?

A lot of good advice here - which pretty much adds up to "The Cartoon" above - "Don’t Waste Your Money" - unless:

1. You have a pretty decent collection of vinyl albums... and/or...

2. Lots of money to invest in acquiring such a collection of "high quality" vinyl... and... the time and patience / tolerance for frustrating detail (cleaning and de-ionizing your vinyl, filtering the pops and scratches without loss of signal quality,, never-ending upgrades of all the turntable, turntable components, and phono pre-amp, etc., etc.)......

3. Are single, without children and other family obligations...

4. Have such a bad case of OCD, that you are compelled to read threads like this... and... to invest lots of your money, time and patience into very, very small refinements in your sound quality... regardless of family obligations...

and...

5. Are prepared to extend your OCD case to SET tube amps, tubes and high efficiency OB speakers to accommodate the tube amps (ala DecWare, etc.)...

Did I mention... "LOT"S OF MONEY!"

Prolly less expensive to find a good analyst to help you recover from your OCD!

rhg3 and ozzy62, thanks for the thoughts, I appreciate it. Not trying to hijack this thread at all. It’s been a tough couple of months. To the OP. I had been thinking to myself, as many of us do, where should my money go? For any audiophiles out there with pressing issues and needed to put money on necessities for the family or oneself, I would not buy a turntable. For anyone battling inner demons and possibly a drug or alcohol problem I would not place throwing money at albums or a turntable before counseling or just tackling those issues first. I have often heard the word “fun” associated with record albums and playing them. More often than with any other audio device. It’s probably true that many young people were instrumental and factored into the vinyl revival movement. So there is a part of me that says, if my issues are not too serious maybe I should through caution to the wind and get into vinyl a second time in my life. Just for the fun of it. It’s something that often we overlook… maybe because we take care of granny, or put our kids schooling first, soccer games and other people. In some cases, not all, it’s ok I think to treat ourselves and relax and enjoy our indulgences. Just a thought …

OP...If you ask the question "Would I be wasting my money to get a turntable?"....The answer is indeed YES

Somewhere the term 'emotional' was used ("friends are emotional about their vinyl). That pretty much says it all. There is nothing wrong to 'like' vinyl. But terms like 'better' do not apply in this context. 

I swore off vinyl some 40 years ago, and still have a hard time imagining how a (even small) mass (needle with coils/magnet, etc) gets 'shoved around' (accelerated, decelerated) say 15,000 times per second trying to follow the hills and valleys pressed into a tiny channel of a plastic disc, then modifying the analog output to be amplified and resemble the 'sound' of a violin for example. 

@mulveling is spot on. 

1. the lp collector's price advantage over digital long ago disappeared decades ago. Even more important, the LP has become a fetish/ fad item driving up the price further. 

2. digital playback has improved a lot

3. Driven by point 1, the world supply of original and analog represses from the era has diminished so much, except for classical. The jury is out on new LP reissues, many of which are mastered at 16-bit, 44 kHz. The AAA recordings are 50-200$ each. 

3. here is the critical point: it depends on what type of music you listen to and when it was made

- If the music was born digital, play it back on digital equipment. I agree that 70s new wave sound awesome and better on LP, because point 3. If you think analog production of born-digital sounds better, just EQ it. 

- Some music/recordings benefit from analog playback, which more pleasingly reveals the sound of the decay of instruments in the reverberant room in which they were recorded, so most classical, jazz, or folk from the 1950s - 70s. The complexity of the sound waves of massed instruments, acoustic instruments, voices, again, in a physical space, in my opinion, still isn't captured by digital recording or remastering (not arguing that the technology cannot capture it, but perhaps some other decisions are being made that produce less-pleasing recordings). Per New Wave and soul, I also love the way analog represents the artifacts of studio recordings. This is not a music snobbery argument, just a "right tool for the job" thing. If those recordings of those types of music are not important to you...

Finally, if you don't have a collection already, for all the reasons above, I would not start.