I have used either AR turntables with Shure V15 cartridge in the earliest days (with a Rabco arm thrown in there for awhile) or a Thorens TD-125 MKII with SME 3009 arm and V15 or other similar cartridges from the early 70s onward to the present day, and I've always treated my records extremely well. Things I own generally last forever because I take good care of them and they still work as-new.
Except for some CDs which fail due to rot no matter how well they are taken car of..... The same can be said of more than a couple CD players whose lasers have worn out, and due to parts unobtanium issues are a lost cause. On the other hand, I can easily today buy a new turntable, arm and cartridge - or vacuum tubes for that matter.
I've used many different turntables as I drifted from one record store job to another. My very first LP---the "White Album"---was played on an all-in one "stereo" record player, featuring a flip down turntable with a flip-over stylus [there was the option of playing 78s back then] topped off by a nickle taped to the tonearm. My father had LP playing devices that were acoustic, used steel needles to play his Nat King Cole and Jackie Gleason LPs. My first [children's] record player was acoustic, played at 45 and 78 rpm, used steel needles. I've used many different cartridges, tracking with a fairly wide range of downward forces. I've had good turntables and bad. This was a fairly common situation for me during "Peak Vinyl", when it took no effort to get a job at a record store, particularly if you could reel off the names of a couple-dozen classical works without blinking. Lots of friends/acquaintances/co-workers had all sorts of different turntables with all sorts of different cartridges. Some were good, most were bad. A lot of my turntables turned out to be AR XAs but I never got a V-15, and that puzzles me to this day.
I suspect that you are a rather pure example of an audiophile. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I am essentially heretical. I tried out any number of "audiophile" experiments before coming to where I am now, where I no longer seek The Absolute Sound, am happy with a convincing microphone feed, which might be a more "accurate" representation of the source recording anyway. I'm less concerned with the sound than the tunes. The point always has been the pursuit of tunes. There were times when I had a boombox, sold off all my LPs and lived off of that for awhile, listening to needledrops of my LPs, some cheap commercial issues or mixtapes, some airchecks. But once I got the next record store job, the cycle would start all over. Now, listening to files ripped from CDs, am hearing things [musical things, like counter-melodies] I didn't hear before.
So, my experience is obviously very different from yours.
