I can't handle digital after analog light my fire

Wow, Elizabeth! My experience is very similar to yours.

After 20 years of exclusive digital listening, I bought a turntable in early 2007. I was so captivated by the difference that I listened to *no* digital music on my system for the next 8 months. Over time I made various upgrades to improve the LP playback, culminating in early 2011 with a Jolida JD9 phono stage and a JD5T line stage. That Jolida line stage uses a solid state (opamp) gain stage with tube buffering. At that point digital music still didn't compete.

In the meantime I changed my focus in digital music from CD player to iTunes on a MacBook. All rips are Apple Lossless and stored on a portable USB drive. Once the music was sourced from the external drive the music sounded less dynammic and involving. Even the iPod Classic playing the same files into my stereo sounded better. Then I got Audirvana Plus music playback software, and configuring it to buffer the music files in RAM and upsampling in multiples of two improved things quite a bit compared to upsampling everything to 24/96, which is the Apple default. But computer playback still wasn't in the league with LP.

Then a couple weeks ago an audiobuddy stopped by with a real tube line stage he wanted to sell. It even had a tube rectifier and a massive transformer. Price was right, especially for how good this sounded. It made my buffered linestage sound 2-dimensional and a little sparse. What really sold me, however, was how the computer-based music now sounded. It sounded liquid, organic, dynamic, and very musically involving. So buying that linestage was like giving me back a library of about 450 digital recordings that I'd had no inclination to listen to.

I haven't really played any CDs through the new line stage; my CD player is a 7-year-old Sony SACD/CD changer. But the MacBook-sourced music sounds killer. Plus, Audirvana can play back FLAC files, so I now have a few 24/96 files from HDTracks, and these are fully competitive with LP, though they trade away a little nuance for lower noise floor and a more sparkling (but no longer irritating) presentation.

Here's something else that's cool--Apple offers a remote control for MacBooks for $20. That's probably next on my list. I can leave the computer on the table while I operate it from the sweet spot.

The engineering and mastering of the particular recording is by far the most significant variable, IMO, followed by the quality of the particular playback equipment. My LP collection considerably outnumbers my CD collection simply because I got into digital much later, but I enjoy both formats, and I have developed no particular bias between them. I have not yet gotten into computer-based audio.

I would invite those in the anti-digital crowd to try to find, for example, some of the now out-of-print (and highly sought after) classical CD's on the Wilson Audio and Chesky labels, to see how good the medium can sound. Most notably, Hyperion Knight performing Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3, on Wilson Audio WCD-9129, and Dvorak's "New World Symphony," on Chesky CD31 (recorded in 1962!).

I would defy anyone to listen to those recordings on a good system and still maintain that the CD medium can't provide outstanding sonics. And that is despite the fact that piano music and symphonic music are among the most challenging types of music to record and reproduce with good results.

Regards,
-- Al

I was that way with CDs/digital from about 1998-2007. Then one day, a light bulb went off and I figured I must be doing something wrong. So I started a concentrated and past due extensive system upgrade to get my digital sounding as good as my vinyl. The jist of the upgrade ran from ~2008-2010. Only my Triangle monitors and my Denon CD recorder survived. Everything else including wires changed.

So now, after all that work and a bit of expense, I am in digital nirvana!

Few things really good come easy.

I know exactly what you are saying. I came back to records from CDs and have not listened so much to music since I ,well, started listening to CDs in the mid 80's. So much better to me. Seems more natural.

As to what is next, you will put together the best analogue system you can afford, and then you will go back to getting a good digital system together because of all the great music only out in digital. LOL! A lot of good music since 1990. Try to get Charles Lloyd's ECM or Chicago Underground output on vinyl. List is to long for me, but those two pop into my head.

Enjoy the music, anyway you can,

You need a better CD player....CD if done right is very good indeed.