Upgrade path question. Upgrade analog or turn to digital?

I have the new DS Audio optical cartridge and its the biggest analog upgrade I’ve done. Highly recommended.

"tempting to have the same quality, just a button away"

Not goon happen without major investment in cables. power supplies and components.

If you spend enough you can get a well built streaming DAC that will get you there without taking up much room. Keep your current setup. Both serve different purposes.

@OP

Tough question since you are already heavily invested in vinyl. Either way you go, I believe there will come a time where you wish you had gone the other way. Meaning, even so you don't have room for both setups, you may want to spend your time and money trying to find the space that will allow it. Best long term advice I can give you.

Tough call. To get streaming properly where the quality won't frustrate you. is fairly pricey, (At least that was my experience) Each format transition was for convenience, 8-tracks played endlessly. Auto-reverse cassettes kept dance going. LP in car? The stacking 45's in pile dropping and grinding into each other to keep the music running. PRO: Digital feed means I never have to leave my chair! That's why we made our own cassettes with "our" music recorded in sequence on continuous play, I even bought an early cassette player that manually flipped the cassette over with robot hand!  But in the process I lost the sound of music. Now I'm back. The music is what I'm here for. My budget wouldn't get me to the quality I want in digital. For me its CD's and vinyl. I own my music. And yes, space is an issue with real things but as our internet is unreliable its nice to be able to just drop the needle and groove.

With digital having over 35 years in it ,you have to spend as much as good analog to beat it very good quality digital cables , roughly in the $1k range ,a very good Ethernet hub the Synergistic research is the best sounding under $2k 

Quality power cords, clean line conditioning ,dedicated line copper outlets ,

and a very good dac such as the Denafrips terminator2 ,or the T+ ,or Holo springs May KTE , the best sounding dacs under $10 k, at 1/2 the cost , imo 

in total around %$12-$15k. To get  very analog sounding digital through streaming ,

equal or better then at $30 k  turntable setup , far better S/N  ratio, distortion much lower blacker backgrounds, much lower bass, a turntable is capable to roughlless then 2/3rds the bits resolution of digital . Digital is capable of 20 true bits ,no more .

Having owned a audio store ,I had many opportunities to compare the last few years digital has gotten much better ,but if you get frugal in even one area you  will hear the. Difference ,if you build a dedicated computer or purchase something from little green computer then you can purchase HQ player dedicate a 2T SS hard drive to i5 and a top 6 core processor and graphics card, memory then the sky is the limit

you can literally Taylor the sound exactly to your liking but it has a learning curve .

i am speaking if you truly want to go all out .