Justin572,
You can slaughter the sound of standard digital music with vinyl, but for your budget, it would take careful choice of equipment. I am a music lover as well as an audiophile. We had a pioneer record player when i married over 40 years ago, yes I'm old, lol. When we jumped back into vinyl about a decade ago, we were given a vintage pioneer of similar quality. It had a $35 vintage cart on it. We owned a vintage Yamaha (year 2000) flagship amp with a built in MM phono preamp, so we were set to plug and play. It was great fun, finding vinyl gems for 25c at the flea markets. Our dvd/cd player in the system was a $500 (in 2000) Yamaha 5 disc player, but we loved the warmth of vinyl playback. You could hear the thinness of standard digital on the system. We had good quality speakers, and the Yamaha amp was $3k back in 2000. So our basic set up was no slouch. We were satisfied, for a while.
Fast forward to today, we learned about how to choose used records that were pristine, and we collected about 1800 records, most of which are audiophile pressings. You MUST clean used records if you want good playback, a spin clean and its matching record cleaning solution will cost about 100 dollars and will greatly help to clean up the sound of old records. We started with that and ended up buying a vacuum record cleaner when we upgraded other gear and started buying expensive pressings. When we would come across an especially dirty, but excellent record, we often start with the SpinClean, , then use the vacuum unit to finish the job.
So, read some reviews on your equipment, see what cartridges and amps the reviewers say sound good with them, and go from there. With vintage, to get good sound, you need some synergy. If you have strident speakers, you might want a more forgiving amp that rolls off the top end. The speaker cables and interconnects are not generally neutral either until you are into the several hundred dollar range, but choosing some decent cables to help adjust your sound toward neutral can help the music present better. We started with Radio shack wire and ended up with some neutral, high quality Tara labs, MIT and audioquest interconnects. We did upgrade speaker cables, and probably need to replace them again, but we found some vintage MIT-750 cables from a decade past (now 2 decades past) and bought them for our system to replace monster cables. Speaker cables that were maybe $1800 new, we got for $300 or so. So looking back a decade or so can help keep cost down. Rule of thumb, whatever your music set up costs, plan on spending 20% of that for cables. Don’t buy $1000 cables for a $300 amp. But don’t buy $10 cables for an $800 amp either. Matching —back to synergy—will help.
You have to decide if you are interested enough in vinyl to do the research, look for records, clean them; look for used gear that works well together. A mismatched turntable/cartridge/amp/preamp can sound awful, or the speakers and amp aren’t a good match—but if you like your digital playback then the speakers and amp are probably ok. whereas sometimes it only takes finding out which element is mismatched with the rest to adjust and get decent playback.
If you enjoy the process, pursue your vinyl. If you just want to push a button and listen to music, then let the vinyl go. Either way, it is the music that is important, however you like it.