Vote Your Ranking -If you have an opinion on this digital subject

1,4,2,3.  The CD you want is probably available used on Amazon. Price vs quality. #3 is hideously expensive. Amazon's streaming is free with Prime and only very slightly inferior to the CD. Best price/quality ration I know of. ENJOY the Music!

Amazon streams at a maximum of 256kbps which is about 2.5:1 compression (after lossless).  Its hardly high end, and even getting that stream requires digging and digging through the configuration menus.  Or pay up for their premium hifi offer.

I actually find Tidal much cheaper at the end of the day, than buying zillions of CDs even used.

Is there any actual evidence that lp's sound better than digital or otherwise?  When auditioning my latest speakers, the dealer used all Esoteric equipment.  Did this over three days using insane equipment (for me) including a network dac (N-01XD ?) and the last day hookup up an clock based on Rubidium isotope, an atomic clock I guess.  When the music was good, it was really fantastic but that was maybe one in ten cuts or worse.  I thought, okay, that was streaming at a pretty good level.  But then we listened to an Esoteric SACD player.  Um, to me, not even close.   Actually that so changed my mind about digital that I regretted , sort of my last digital player purchase.

For most of the last 50 years vinyl was the best (not including reel to reel). Digital has gotten better and better… particularly in the last ten years. But the change first happened in the $1/2 million digital systems and worked down. 

‘’Just think about the question a moment. There are hundreds of brands of turntables, phono stages, DACs… and thousands of users that have different values on what “great” sounds like. I know some people that systems scraping up the last bit of detail is “great”, and I will go running out of the room with my hands clasped over my ears yelling “make it stop”… ($150K).

So it depends on the price point and the components chosen and the listeners values. But, in general you still will get a bit higher performance out of the vinyl side for equivalent investment. This is particularly true at the lower cost levels. You can see my system under my user ID.  at this time my digital and analog end are equal in there performance… they are pretty similar in cost at ~$40K each. I know folks with $500K systems and they say analog performs better, requiring a 10% - 20% premium. People I trust. 
 

But at this time I am absolutely sure if you spend the time and effort you can get spectacular results from either in systems from $25K - $250K. I think the nod goes to Ana log below that.

One other thing. In todays world (as in my system) streaming (with same red book quality) equals CD player (higher Rez files streaming wins) = analog. I have a new tone arm on the way… analog may pull ahead a bit. But probably just a bit.