How much do you need to spend to get digital to rival analog?

Fleschler.
I will grant you that were indeed a number of poorly recorded tapes sold, but so too CD and records.
There were/ are some superb pre recorded tapes as well though but yes generally a very well home recorded tape on say TDK SA media on a top flight Nakamichi deck can sound spectacular.
As good as same treatment on a good r2r? No of course not but nothing like Mijo blanket critique.
If his Dragon truly gave such poor results it obviously needs a full restoration!

@mikelavigne
Hello Mike,

...he heard tape and vinyl do dynamics far beyond what any digital could do

I am perplexed at the use of the word "can" because digital, esp hi-rez, *can* do dynamics (i.e. the difference between the lowest & highest amplitude reproduced) beyond what analogue *can* do.
Whether the files contain such dynamics is another matter, of course -- in my experience, they often do not! In fact, much of the digital content available today is abysmally compressed. Additionally, the digital compression rate is much higher than we find in LPs. compression, I believe, is one reason why vinyl sounds better: because the source material is better, to begin with.

In this respect, it is not surprising that an LP in your system has better dynamics and generally sounds better than many (mediocrely mastered) digital files.

Following up on @ct0517 post above, I have compared a vinyl reproduction to the same LP encoded 20/192 (direct from the TT output). The playback results in both digital & analogue were not particularly different; being of a certain age, I like the analogue sound—but frankly, I cannot say the digital copy sounded bad in any way (in fact, I'm not sure I could easily tell the difference!).

@tzh21y
As to the original question:As mentioned before, the answer to this depends on certain variables, but to simplify things, let's assume an excellent quality LP and a similarly outstandingly mastered digital counterpart and an outstandingly well set up TT with a superb sounding phono.
In my experience, you would need in excess of 3k for a high performing dac, a reclocker, and a very good music player & suitable cabling in between.

Maybe I will take a look at the Lampizator as they seem to be pretty well respected.  The best I've heard to date have been the DCS products.  Still, they do not sound like my very modest analog rig.  

I wiz listening to some NOS early Beatles cassettes - the ones you never see anymore, blue with no barcode - yesterday on my SONY Professional portable cassette player. You simply cannot hear dynamic range like that on any Beatles CD - especially the recent spate of reissues that came out on the last few years. It’s great to hear the opening Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the way it’s SUPPOSED to sound. Same for the White Album on early cassette.