Oh, man. A 15 page thread for a topic that's barely 2 days old .... do you guys have jobs, family, or friends?
Since opinions are like ... well, everybody's got one, I'm just gonna go ahead and confess that as soon as I could afford to, I ripped all my vinyl to FLAC, then started replacing most of it with CDs -- going out of my way to find first-release CDs on eBay wherever I could, but accepting whatever I could get in some cases. Cuz seriously, folks -- compression sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as pops, ticks, and sibilance.
The best phono cartridges I could afford in my 20s were elliptical, and in my 30s were line-contact (and that was only because they were being dumped at stupid-cheap because anyone with any sense had moved on to CDs), and still, there was high frequency distortion that drove me to distraction. The amount of money I would have had to spend to make my vinyl sound as good as a cheap CD player is just insane, and I think, for me, that's the nut of this whole debate: ROI.
I'm also objective enough to know that if I
did have mid-5 figures worth of cash lying around to spend on a audio equipment (and trust me, I do not), that money would be much better spent on speakers than on anything else in the chain.
But, as Dennis Miller would say, that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.