Would you still pay $10k or more for a turntable not full analog front end these days ?


Or you would rather pay that for a streamer ?

 

inna

@lewm - they are delivered without any losses over USB connection as are bits you write and read from USB flash drive or a hard disk. Else you would write one thing and read another. USB does not lose anything, ever, unless media (SSD, flash) is defective. There is no "timing" there.

Of course, it is another story, if you connect over optical or SPDIF....

I have and am very pleased that I did. I have over 1000 albums so for me it makes sense. I want to hear these pressings in their best presentation. If I was starting off and hand a very limited number of albums or CDs I would put all my money into streaming and start with the best DAC I could afford. Maybe even DAC plus power amp and streamer. Of course speakers at the top of the list. No need for a preamp because no inputs. 

Out of curiosity, how much $$$ do you have invested each in your analog and streaming setups, and what are you using as a streaming service?  BTW, I can veryeasily tell the differences between various recordings of the same material in Qobuz, and I’m only using a $400 iFi Zen Stream (with their iPowerX power supply).

@soix my setup is mostly vintage, but have a new TT that was a few thousand, and a mid range streamer from Cambridge Audio. Use mostly Tidal. I can tell the difference from high-res to medium. My streamer does a good job of making most stuff sound good. There are only a few streams that I'll skip when they are bad. It's usually old Blues that just had crap recordings. My point was that my TT picks up bad recordings much easier then my streamer.

@tubes4good A lot more if I had an unlimited supply of FIM purchased in the last century. The cost of film has risen many times the cost of LP's.

My film freezer:

A day without exposing and developing a film is a day wasted.