Will a $700 turntable outperform a CD player?

Get yourself a CD player and move on.
If you're not already established in vinyl and $700 is your budget...CD is the way to go.  Excellent sound, more available music and way more bang for your buck.

I own two turntables and around 4k vinyl albums....but I'm 66 years old and already knee-deep in this hobby for 5 decades.  If I were starting out today, I wouldn't give vinyl the time of day.  I'd concentrate on tightening up my digital game.

Ah little grasshopper - the three-fold embeddings are the path to truth and Nirvana; All else is Maya, which some call illusion).  Even as the holy Trinity guides our steps and the three Margas - righteously followed - lead to Moksha. While the 3-in-1 icecream satisfies the cravings of the mortal coil...

Come on Mahgister - HELP!

You are very good in sarcasm....can you really think also?

The 3 embeddings is not a dogma, it is an expression, a designation of 3 elementary task to upgrade any audio system.... That gives more change in S.Q. than anything else almost....

Vibrations-resonance problem...

Electrical grid noise level controls....

Acoustical field of the room transforming by passive and active methods....

Amen....

By the way i sell nothing, buy nothing, and do it with cheap material or very low cost electronic components by myself....

Who is deluded then?

I have my primary turntable in the shop for some upgrades.

In the mean time I bought a innuos zen III and a line magnetic dac. I also purchased a technics sl 1800 with a ortofon black MM cartridge.

I think the two are close to equal. Neither compare to my primary turntable

While I tend to prefer vinyl for several of the reasons mentioned by others, the one that sounds best on my system really boils down to the particular recording. At it’s best, I do tend to feel more like I’m at the venue with vinyl, but I can certainly enjoy CD too.

I’ve got a decent cartridge that’s well matched with the arm on a modest turntable (AT-LP120XUSB with VM95SH shibata stylus...< $400 invested), and am getting better sound from it than I ever expected. At first the TT clearly sounded more detailed to me than my Denon CD440, but after I added a low cost Topping E30 DAC, CDs sometimes sound pretty darn good, depending on the recording. So there’s hope for both.

The rest of your system can make a huge difference how both sound. The clearer it is, the more differences you can hear.