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What excellent responses to your question you've gotten!

I'd have to say that you've had more than enough great advice here to help you make an intelligent decision that you can surely live with happily. The question is, though, to what extent do you want to seek out this used vinyl that Kal and others have mentioned? It would take a long time and much money to collect the really good vinyl, and while everyone here appears to make you want to think that a bad sounding vinly LP was never made, that's just not true; I've got hundreds of them.

Like Kal, I have thousands of records (about 3500 to be close to a full count), but some of them haven't been played in decades, or possibly as much as 35 years. I collected records starting about 1957, but stopped doing so in earnest about 12 years ago. Over the years, I had given away several thousands of older ones to make room for the newer ones. Sure, there has been the occasional purchase since i slowed down, but those have been used collectors' items that have never appeared in any digital format -- or if they had, the remastering was so bad as to render it useless to the avid audiophile.

As you get older though, you might decide, as I have, that the ritual for preparing an old LP for playback just isn't worth the time. I won't deny that LPs do sound better than digital recordings most of the time, but they're certainly far more inconvenient.

One poster mentioned that he doesn't play SACD all that often anymore, and I find this true chez moi also. In fact, just checking my collection database, I see that I've purchased only 29 SACDs -- 18 classical, 11 "other." And I'd venture that my SA-14 hasn't been fired up in a month or so. Why? Well, because it's my experience that there are literally hundreds more great sounding CDs in my collection than SACDs, and I have a CD-only player that sounds better than my SA-14. So, in order to preserve the SACD player for years to come without it becoming inoperable, I choose to use it only when necessary.

Having said all of that, I'd tend to disagree with all the well-meaning folks who've uged you to adopt vinyl playback, but only because you have placed a $2000 limit on the amount that you want to spend. For that kind of money, I don't believe that it's possible to put together a vinyl playback system that could rival the sound of a quality used SACD player that's been modified for optimum playback. Make it $10K and I'd be singing a different tune.

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  Michael Percy Audio  

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