Upgrade path question. Upgrade analog or turn to digital?

My feeling is that you can always go digital in other audio in your life, but vinyl is what you have set up your system for. regardless of sound quality either way, the physical aspect of vinyl has been part of the catch for me. Same with coffee. I grind my beans with a hand grinder. Have had the same grinder for 35 years now. In my mind, why would I put the beans into very noisy electric grinder and ruin the mood to begin with? 

If you decide change make sure you listen to a digital system you really like before you go that route. Whatever you decide to do I find that room correction software like ARC from Anthem/Paradigm, Audyssey or Dirac is a must have, not a nice to have. I have a very well treated room and room correction software works better in that environment. It can't make magic out of a bad room, just dial in one that is already decent.

ADD Streaming; KEEP Vinyl. 

Worn stylus is a great opportunity to try a different cartridge, do it soon, have your existing cartridge as a backup.

Do you have the few tools and skills to align a new cartridge? 

I guess I would start with how old are you? I’m 70 and have had vinyl all my life. So, it was great having my really good vinyl rig as a comparison as I brought my digital up to the level of my analog… a nearly forty year odyssey. I listen 98% of the time to streaming… but it is fun to spin a disk once in a while.

In general, if components are carefully chosen, it will cost around a 10 - 20% more to get the digital streaming end up to analog in systems in the $10K - $50K system cost area. In the $50 -150K systems you can do digital for about the same cost as analog for the same sound quality. After that analog pulls ahead again with the cost advantage.

But the advantages of digital are enormous. $14.99 / month for access to a nearly infinite library… Qobuz… half a million high Rez albums. So, unless you are an old fart like me I would go for digital and drop analog. I think the vinyl resurgence is peaking and in the next ten years will start falling as digital gets the cost advantage at lower price points and vinyl becomes only nostalgic. Progress in digital is rapid now.

Yeah, and put yourself at the mercy of the streaming services with their compressed data streams! They do this to get their files to fit on the 'Net pipelines. Once data is discarded it cannot be recovered!