Damn you. Busted again. ; )
Still...and upon reflection...the advantage to digital is it takes much of the hardware out of the equation. So in a sense, it becomes more about the music, at least for me.
But it’ll never be as sexy as analog two channel, because you really can’t do anything to improve upon it. What you can do is in the remaining analog domaine..the loudspeaker. For all intensive purposes, DA conversion has been nailed. 120 SN is meaningless unless you’re a bat, so the fun playing with hardware days except for speakers) is essentially over.
And yes, as I edit this, I know Class D amps aren’t digital...but so many of them test so well, it’s pretty much purchase, install and replace them only when they die. Upgrading has become even more of an illusion than ever before. And “Upgrading” is fun, right?
Those turntables are ridiculous. I think one of them might have been a fusion reactor though, or at least just a slightly modified one... ; )
Oh I get what you are saying when saying that for you digital takes a lot of hardware out of the equation.
It's the age old dance for audiophiles where, unlike the cheesy cliche that we care about gear not the music, most of us really are very heavily in to music and it's our prime motivation for owning a hi-fi system. But we can have that struggle sometimes of where getting mired in all the technical stuff can start feeling more like a distraction and we want to get back to that former innocence where it was "just the music" with no thought of the gear.
And I'd bet that for many audiophiles, as it was for me, that some initial formative moments, first hearing music on a great system, spurred the journey and it's also sort of what we are trying to get back to, if not preserve. That is, you were a music lover, then you heard some music you like on a fantastic sound system, say a pal who got in to hi-fi before you, and it blew your mind. But it's like the perfect nirvana moment where you are a total music lover, whose experience of the music is utterly elevated by hearing it as you'd never heard it before, but you aren't yet an audiophile aware of all the technical and gear issues, not involved in pursuing your own system, so you get that perfect mesh of focusing on the music with a "wow" of the enhanced audio quality, without the distracting neurosis in knowing all about the gear.
I've seen exactly this experience happen for countless guests of mine, where I play music they love, they are just hypnotized and utterly blown away by the music and sound, but in a pure way undiluted or distracted by the actual technology involved.
Anyway, as to "getting back to it being all about the music," your example of digital shows why this is so subjective.
It makes perfect sense to think that a digital system will be a more direct path to just listening to the music, in theory anyway, given all the gear and tweaky concerns that go along with a turntable system. The fact that it works out in practice for many who made that switch makes perfect sense. But...we all have our own idiosyncratic brains and histories, so it's not one size fits all.
For me, it was getting back in the vinyl that made it "more about the music," in the sense of allowing me to relax more and just enjoy listening to music vs interrogating my audio system. I think some of it came from the fact that there was just a natural lowering of expectation with vinyl. It's imperfect, I expect it to be imperfect, so my expectations are lowered in terms of perfectionism. Which actually makes me relax. That plus the way the physical aspects seem to focus me more on listening through albums, rather than flicking through songs on my digital system.