Sell quality turntable to buy top CD player?

Sunnyjim, If you never intend to buy another LP, then scrap your vinyl set-up or keep a minimal one for playing your small collection. If you ever leave Hawaii for a vacation on the West Coast, you ought to be able to haul back a few LPs from a high quality re-saler in SF or LA. Just a thought.

You mentioned the Ayre cdp. I own a C5XeMP. All Ayre gear that I know of is said to sound best via balanced inputs and outputs, not via "unbalanced". Perhaps that was a typo, as I don't believe your Rogue gear offers balanced inputs in any case. But that issue is no reason to avoid Ayre products. They're excellent, but so are the Sony XA5400ES and the Oppo BDP105 (or the even cheaper BDP83 SE, on the used market), for less money.

What about the all-new Rega Saturn-R CD player (roughly $3,000 US).

It comes with a built-in DAC should you ever decide to get into digital downloads or invest in a digital streamer/player.

http://the-ear.net/review-hardware/rega-saturn-r-cd-playerdac

%@$# NO ! nothing else to be said about that issue!

I have a large vinyl collection, to me at least. About a thousand. CD's around 500.The vinyl sounds better with more variance between recordings. Almost gave up on it though.
That said, It would be a reach to say it would be worth it to put together a vinyl collection and a vinyl rig from scratch today. The advice from those above who know digital seems the most prudent thing to follow, but I personally listen to very few CDs. But the vinyl rig was 12K.

Dentdog, good comments. You touched on something most of us who have gone all digital think about frequently. If one were starting from scratch (no pun intended) with a 5K budget for a source, would one do better with a vinyl set up or with one of the high quality/high value digital systems, like a Modwright Oppo 105 or Modwright Sony HAPZ1?

I dearly loved vinyl. I never owned a cassette deck or reel to reel machine. The transition to digital back in 83 was driven by one consideration-- Money!

My entire rig was worth about $1200, I had a vinyl collection < 100, and I thought I could do better going with a CD system. It was probably the correct choice.

Resetting the clock to 2014, I think we are starting to understand how to do digital right. Over the last few years, the emotional element has returned to my listening in a very strong way. This is something that was largely absent in my listening during the period from 84 to 09. I've had the pleasure of using a source that doesn't scream digital, and has all the virtues of digital- S/N, dynamic range, absent vinyl noise, etc. For this reason, and because I now have a CD collection of ~ 1500, and because of the extensive availability of classical music on CD, digital remains the better choice.

As far as sound quality, I can't argue how a $5K investment in tt, arm, cartridge, and phono pre would stack up against my recently modded ModWright HAPZ1 or MW Sony 5400. Its an experimental question, which I am not really motivated to answer. It would seem the OP went through the same analysis and came to the same conclusion.

I think it is good that this thread has been largely devoid of dogmatically derived answers. Let the music answer the question.