If you think of it as a hobby, and not the be all and end all, then vinyl is a fun way to go. These are the last few years of picking up treasures at garage sales, in attics, and from friends getting rid of their past lives. My advice is to do it all on the cheap. Grab a mint direct drive turntable (Denon,Teknics,Pioneer...)at the next yard sale you attend ($10) and then pick up a new bottom of the line (Ortofon, Grado, Audio Technica...) cartridge. A carbon fibre brush. and some distilled water for cleaning old albums, and you are in business. There are lots of websites that will show you how to align the cartridge and it is really easy. The counterweights on most turntables are fairly accurate, and the Japanese consumer tables keep their settings very well. I won't ever claim that the sound is more accurate than a good digital recording, but there is still something magical about sound coming out of a vinyl groove. There are many recordings that have never made it to disk, or have been mastered so poorly that the LP sounds better. The irony is that with records being all but extinct, today's technology allows them to sound better than they ever did.
A few simple rules. 1) use the high side of the downforce range for the cartridge. 2) Don't pay much for used records. You can't tell how they will sound by looking at surface scratches. The damage hides deep in the grooves. 3) Don't believe anything the high end turntable salespeople throw at you. If you think the people who sell cables are out to lunch, you won't believe what the vinyl faction sells as gospel.
