Quote Originally Posted by blackraven View Post
Congrats on a very good TT. You will eventually want to upgrade the cartridge and phono preamp to get the best sound.

Vinyl just sounds different compared to digital. It is smoother and generally much more satisfying. But bad vinyl just like bad digital recordings sound bad.

I have an audiophile friend who is in his early 30's and he is heavily into computer digital music. He had never heard vinyl until he came over to my house and he fell in love with vinyl and how it sounds. He is now wanting a TT.

I have to say that good digital is very satisfying especially since I discovered that computer based music with an excellent player like "Bug Head" (which makes JRiver sound low fi and HQ Player sound mid fi in comparison) and a great DAC blows SACD out of the water and it can give Vinyl a run for the money.
I haven't listened to vinyl for 3-4 years even though my hi-fi experience dates back to the time vinyl and tape were the only options. The TT is somewhere in the basement gathering dust.

Yes, vinyl may sound different from the same recording in digital form. One reason is that the vinyl version is likely mastered differently than the digital. Notoriously, the digital versions are often more compress so that they are more playable on, e.g., portable players.

Personally I listen almost entirely classical music. New classical recordings on vinyl are very rare, i.e. your selection will be very limited if you want to have only vinyl. Anyway, compression is less often used for classical music or used to a lessor extent. High-resolution media make compression technically obsolete.