Help my analog sound as good as my streaming

@jeffrey75 and many others - thanks for the constructive suggestions!

Nowdays the audiofile qualities (if not the musicality) of entry level digital has improved a lot. On the other hand, a good vinyl system starts at a relatively much higher price point. While digital is plug and pray, with analogue you need a lot of skill to set it up correctly and to get the most out of it. Slight adjustments do make the difference between crappy sound and gates of heaven. Cheaper vinyl rigs will not have as powerful base as good & similar priced digital rigs, and they play more surface noise than music. You have to step up to serious table & arm, LOMC cartridge, and a serious phono stage to get true base, and lack of distracting surface noise - but when you reach that point, you become a vinyl collector and your living room will look like mine or even worse  (you feel as if you are lost in a library... LOL).Also, as it has been mentioned before, the recording is everything. The vinyl rig will not make every recording sound top notch - it will present them what they are. If recorded and pressed poorly, it will sound poorly. If recorded in the digital domain, it will sound exactly as if you were streaming it or it was a CD. If recorded and pressed well, it will transform your world, and flip your expectations around. The most frequent comment I am getting from my better half: "It sounds distorted and noisy, why are we listening to CD again?" Yup. When your vinyl rig is spot on, then digital can often appear noisy and distorted in comparison. Control and artifice, instead of vinyl's music and freedom.
There is the often told saying: digital is perfect until you hear correctly done vinyl for the fist time. Then the illusion of perfection is ruined forever.... sadly, it has happened to me. However, I have a modest record collection, can play a couple records every day for decades without playing same thing twice, so I am not afraid of running out of material and be forced back to lean and mean digital diet anytime soon.
Fair warning, if you insist on improving your vinyl setup, you have a good chance to end up like I did.... if you have place for a few thousand records, go for it. If you plan to move a lot, and living space is scarce, that's another story. (Even though that never stopped me... ;).

@coys21, you mention a limited budget, perhaps instead of spreading the cash between vinyl and digital just choose one and run with that. If you choose vinyl then digital can always be added later, or the other way round.

At a recent audio show I noticed there were more demos done with digital than vinyl! The top digital rooms I heard were deeply satisfying.

If you go with vinyl then before you upgrade your cartridge rather upgrade TT and arm first. This will sound better with your existing cartridge than your present TT with the most expensive cartridge.

I can ’see’ lots of raised eyebrows at this comment. Explanation. Lets give the cartridge an easy task. Lets ask it to track a 10000Hz sine wave. Easy enough, all the stylus has to do is change direction 20000 times in one second. Now imagine what torture it must go through to play music! To transduce this micro info the cartridge effectively needs to be held immovable above the undulating grooves by the arm/TT combo whilst at the same time moving across the record. This arm also needs a split-personality. A: It must appear to be infinitely massive within the audio spectrum to extract the tiniest of info,  B: while also appearing to be massless below the spectrum so that it does not transduce record warp.

It takes expensively manufactured spindle bearings and finely engineered arms to allow the cartridge to do it’s job. The take away from this is to ignore the recommendations to upgrade to an expensive cartridge. In fact a low compliance MC cart. would just shake the arm and TT bearings defeating any chance at improvement and would sound worse. The delicate info would be lost. Sad but true.

I gave up vinyl 40 years ago due to circumstances and now use digital only.

”Learn to recognize and appreciate what your analog rig is doing. Because I assure you, it already sounds leagues better than streaming.”

Miller”trust your ears”carbon has finally lost the plot entirely. 

I should have also mentioned that once you have a very good TT and arm then upgrading the cartridge would now make sense and you will be able to hear what different ones bring to the party.

Room acoustics play a very big part and must be considered. Treating the room has a larger effect than most realise. I strongly encourage you to include some treatment, that is if you haven't already.