The first part of my life was all vinyl. I used an Akai GX210D high quality reel tape too, but the "real" sound was always the record. I never liked cassette tapes.
When the CD arrived and mixed up the audio world, very suddenly the quality of pickup's exploded and prices dropped. Company's like Ortofon tried to save their sinking boat. It felt like they put a new, better and even cheaper product out every few month.
We were a bunch of audio crazy students and often meet to try new things we had bought or build, to compare them together. There was one guy with a very large, high basement room where we used to make A-B comparisons. Don't know what the neighbors thought about the young people carrying speakers and gear in and out all the time. We had no cheap stuff, but only high value products, often passed down from (not too poor) parents.
When one of us bought the first affordable CD player, it was the most interesting thing to compare it to our record players.
We had the same recordings on CD and vinyl. In the beginning no one, listening to CD, said something else but "Oh sh*t, that's it for the record". We suddenly realized that a part of the vinyl sound was some kind of distortion we were simply used to. Hearing all the bass and tremble of a recording without any other artifacts, was shocking. I think we all tried to be quite objective.
What was the answer, as we all had huge record collections? So after a short time we all got new pickup's for our loved record players. What I took away from that time, at the apex of the vinyl era, is that considered the record player meets a minimum quality standard, it's price doesn't matter, it is only the pickup that changes anything. I remember we got player from Thorens, Dual, Technics, Denon, JVC and some other established brands in the range from 200 to 1500 DM, which was a lot of money at that time. You got a good, used car for 1500 DM! At that time, the usual high end 1k DM record player you bought in a shop, had a 50 DM AKG OEM cartridge build in at best. That's what the majority of even expensive stereo's used. "Music lovers" got a Shure for about 150 DM, the pro audio standard quality. That was considered crazy expensive by "normal people". I talk about average upper middle class home.
We bought in the 200-400 DM range street price, just the pickup! That was the region where a good recording started to match the CD.
The point was, that even the cheapest record player sounded best, when the usually most expensive pickup was installed.
Our usual set-up was a Hafler amp, an AVM pre and a pair of large VIFA 3-ways. A DIYS that had won some comparisons to expensive commercial speakers. So something even today most here would like.
What was most impressive, that some expensive player did not well in the low range (the old pickups didn't play it) and developed feed backs at even medium SPL.
There simply was no reasonable relation between sound and price of record players, only look and feel changed.
I finished vinyl with a high output system from Ortophon in the 300 DM range. After a few years CD player sounded even better, prices dropped and any new recording was pressed in vinyl and CD. I got feed up with the deteriorating sound of records, the weight and sensitive needles. The best records I had at that time was something called DMM = Direct metal master. Anyway, rare and expensive. A few years ago I set up a record player, because my children didn't know what that thing was. It was quite disappointing. The girls asked me, really surprised, "that was what you had to listen to?". They heard all these vinyl typical noises of used records we had learned to ignore.
What I have to admitt, setting up and using the record player, after that many years, was quite amusing. I still got two in storage.
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