I sold a $15k turntable setup and all my vinyl because getting a very good dac surpasses a good analog setup. I spent $7k on a dac and it sounds better than my analog setup. If you go on a budget, its going to be hard to get the best sound in either setup. I use a network interface to the dac instead of the flawed USB which improves SQ. When I was into analog, I have friends that have $100k in analog setups and in those cases, a very good vinyl album would be very close to the same album in DSD or MQA format.