Who uses high end TT setup for vintage records ?

Yes, I believe the all analogue nature of early vintage vinyl recordings is the key to their often uniquely lovely sound.

Digital vinyl certainly can be better than CD, but the question is how often and what is the cost to enable.

Personally, I am have no preference for digitally mastered vinyl over good CD home digital, but that is just me.

I have recorded many vintage vinyl recordings to CD quality digital to play from my music server and find that much if not all of the original charm is preserved along the way. That tells me playback format is less important than how the recording is made.

Also, FWIW, I find vintage Mercury Living Presence recordings on CD to share a lot of similarities to more modern Mapleshade recordings. These are two of my favorite CD labels. Both are purely analog recordings on CD. The MLPs from the 50's and 60's and the Mapleshades current.

What are the best recent Jazz releases. Looking for the best sound and performance. Hopefully its analog. For the most part my modest jazz collection was recorded 50 years ago. I would like some new stuff to compare it with.

Worth looking for recordings on the Venus label including Chano Dominguez, Bill Charlap, Eric Alexander, etc.

I have another theory as to why records pressed in the 50s and 60s sound as good as they do. In addition to the fact that the recording, mastering and pressing were all done with tube gear, we shouldn't overlook the fact that all of this electronic processing was done in a cleaner environment than exists anywhere today. In the modern world, every piece of electronic gear that is plugged into the power grid is affected by the nasty spikes and high-frequency noise from computers, appliances and the like. Moreover, every piece of electronic gear today, whether connected to the power grid or not, operates in a polluted soup of high-frequency noise---microwaves, cell phones, wi-fi and all sorts of unwanted digital transmissions are simply part of our environment. There is no escape from these forms of interference. Every LP pressed in 2012 has this noisy environment embedded into the vinyl grooves to some degree, whereas no record pressed in the 60s or earlier suffers from it.

Of course, the above is just speculation and there is no way to prove how much of an effect it has. Plus I am aware we can use power line filters and equipment can be shielded to minimize the effects. Nevertheless, the interference can only be reduced, not eliminated. Just some food for thought.

SAlectric.

That's an interesting theory.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the hifi industry was still new and a novelty back then and leading studios invested to be on the cutting edge. There was a greater attention to technical details along the lines of modern Mapleshade recordings, which is an anomaly these days. I suspect most studios use tried and true "proven" technical gear and approaches in teh interest of cost efficiencies these days in that it is not as hard to deliver a decent quality recording though delivering the best of anything is always a challenge.