Will a $700 turntable outperform a CD player?

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.

Very unlikely. Two completely different mediums. One destroys what is being played a little bit every time and the other is contactless and digital, no audible noise and at higher sampling frequencies almost indistinguishable from the true recording.

Regardless of what everyone will claim here about turntables/vinyl, they will never reach the quietness and dynamic range of a CD or SACD. An engineering impossibility.

I have a pretty good turntable and love listening to it.  Nice to look at....  but I am also real about it as well. It is a dying technology, just like anything else when its time comes. One day, something else will come and will kill digital too. Only a matter of time......

@mcmvmx:  I’m no expert, but when I wrote that, I was referring to the noted (here noted) superior sound of vinyl versus that of CD’s.  The latter are recorded at 16/44.1, while I am recording the vinyl at a conversion rate of 24/96.  So, if you start out with superior sound from vinyl and then record that at 24/96, it seemed to me that I would end up with a better sounding recording than is found on CD. I stand to be corrected if I am wrong, but an explanation would be helpful.

As a relatively new vinyl come back, I can say I prefer the overall vinyl experience vs CD/digital. Having said that, there are times when listening to LP’s simply isn’t practical. I still listen to cd’s, and I listen to a lot of digital music as well. To answer your specific question... it depends. While a “$700 table” might be able to be set up well and blow away some cd setups, it just depends. It isn’t as simple as the turntable alone. The good thing is 700.00 isn’t the end of the world investment wise. It’s still a good amount of coin, but in the big scheme of hifi land, not so much. It’s a rather inexpensive experiment. See if you can find some of your favorite bands/tunes on vinyl and do a head to head... I think you will be surprised...

Buy an SL1200 if you like to hear hum... i was a DJ too and this turntable was the best ti mix, but it's nowhere near a HiFi one.
You mentioned CD, it depends on the one you compare.  CD can be great or...mediocre. I've converted my best plates into FLAC, same fir my CD collection and now i have it all at my fingertip!
I use a good HiFi USB DAC with my soundsystem and it sounds great.  I use volumio (web interface/android client) and mpd/ncmpcpp (my linux server).
Vinyl: no thanks. Inferior media but sure it's ok if you like the sound!