That’s great, thank you for clearing that up!!
Why bother with lp cleaning, VTA adjustment, lps storage, platform isolation, buying costly records, return some….clean the stylus…and have a distorted sound with unnatural warmth and softness, not accurate at all. It’s a nonsense guys!
Buy a Chord Dave or even a cheap Topping dac , and you will be in audio nirvana accuracy!
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Because some people like all the faff and warm cuddly sound. I know I do!
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I too 
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That’s what you Rega owners always whine about 
Buy a Technics; flick a lever, rotate the tonearm base, flick the lever back, job done 
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Do you adjust the VTA for each records, as some are 120 gr, other 180 or 140 ?
Some do that, and have sometimes 3 arms on their deck. With a nice vocal jazz, they use a Koetsu cart. With classical, an Ortofon, and Lyra for rock .
I am not in that category of extreme audiophiles.
I do not
If I ever end up buying a second headshell and alternative cart to my DV10x5 it would be nice to quickly tweak VTA if it needed it, but I do not ever anticipate changing it otherwise 
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Surely the best reason is that a small but non-negligible % of my favourite music is not on Qobuz or Tidal, and a rather larger % is better on vinyl than on the digital versions available. Hot Rats and Gryphon may be good examples of the latter, but (as mentioned) not the only ones.
Why wouldn’t I listen to the best version, whichever format that means?
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Look at my profile….you will see if I was serious.
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My apologies: after an hour or two on here, my sarcasm/ sincerity sensor packs up.
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This describes my experience about five years ago almost exactly.
I would add, though, that a pretty basic (although well-fettled), old, LP12 with a simple pro-ject carbon arm and low-cost cartridge through an Audio Note Kits valve phono preamp sounded a good deal more musical than my at the time reference level streamer/DAC, which was picked because it was the most musical one I could find… on decent-ish pressings at least.
So I would also agree that, thought it’s a pain in the rear in many ways, I do think that it’s capable of sounding more pleasing than quite esoteric digital…
This sounds logical, but it’s not the case in reality.
When I ran my LP-12 with a valve phono preamp, it was into a full-range Meridian DSP setup, with the 818v3 acting as a ADC/DAC. This sounded very significantly different (and more pleasing to my ears) than the 818v3 streaming digital direct.
I don’t believe that the reason people prefer vinyl is because digital isn’t capable of conveying everything that’s on it, I think it just has very benign, pleasing “euphonies”, for want of a better term. If you like it, you like it, as I did, but it’s not inherently superior, it’s just very pleasant indeed and something happens with a pressing, and a needle in a groove and a phono stage, which doesn’t happen with a digital master direct to DAC…
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Actually, I believe it’s both logical and correct. I was very careful not to call one better or worse or anything of the sort. Whichever you prefer, you prefer, for whatever reason. But, IN MY OPINION, if you’re converting to digital and then back to analog, you are primarily listening to your dac, not to your cartridge/phono section (obviously, everything contributes something to the sound, but that’s not the point - the OP was asking about an ‘end game’ vinyl rig, and in my world that doesn’t include digitizing the analog signal and then converting it back to analog; in yours it might). I don’t see anything in your post that makes my statement incorrect, just that you enjoyed it the other way. Great!
Live long and prosper, my friend.
Personally I don’t have a preference in absolute terms. I enjoy both.
But if I want to listen to an ORIGINAL ANALOG ALBUM from the 70’s, it will sound so much better on a good turntable / cart/ phono vs a digital source, be it Nd555/twin ps or even full DCS stack.
It’s not about more euphoric or pleasing sound , but more truthful , much more real and alive.
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It doesn’t really matter that much. The difference in cutting head angles is much larger than any change we can make.
For piece of mind I do set it, usually with a 180gr record (no reason, just consistent), but don’t fuss about it.
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Perhaps I misunderstood your post.
My interpretation (perhaps wrongly) was that you seemed to be implying that playing back a vinyl source through a digital system would reduce the quality/sound signature to that of the DAC. I.e. that it would be inferior/different digitised relative to an analogue-only path.
Hence my comment that first hand experience of this has taught me that as long as it’s a decent, transparent ADC/DAC, this is not the case. I was quite surprised, I must admit, and learned something about both vinyl and digital replay.
This is the interesting part, though, to me. I would also describe the vinyl source as more ‘real’, ‘human’, alive, etc. But these qualities were preserved through the digital conversions relative to hi-res digital tracks of the same material through the exact same source/DAC.
The only conclusion is that something in the imperfections, some euphonies, in the vinyl/analogue part of the chain before it hit the ADC/DAC actually make the music more human/alive to us. This also jives with my experience that valve amps do the same, yet we know them to be euphonic…
Quite the contrary - I purposefully didn’t say that (and in my follow up post(s), which is/are a little more expansive, I expressly acknowledged that it might indeed be better to some, even if it’s not my personal preference - although we might have been talking about scotch whisky at that point, the analogy was still in play 
). My point was simply that it’s not the same experience. Zero judgment one way or the other - just my long time enthusiast/purist point of view.
No worries - I’ve been at this long enough to know that there are more opinions than audiophiles, and the only people who are doing something ‘wrong’ are the people who are unhappy with their systems. If your way works for you and my way works for me, then we’re both happy and we’re both good.
Peace out.
There’s a lot of effort to be put in vinyl if one would to match the SQ, ease of use and music readiness of say a Superuniti. Same goes for spinning CDs.
Still, there’s something magical about shuffling a book or a magazine or getting a disk ready to be played on a lazy afternoon after everyone has left and it’s just you in the house…
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A matched ADC-DAC is far less of a character actor than a lone DAC. Largely because the DAC reconstructs without assumptions; the encoding style is known. This is why everything from digital preamps to digital crossovers are quite benign. The guesswork has mostly been removed from the conversion.
Case in point, many years ago a colleage was saying nothing sounds like vinyl and digital was cold in comparison. Well, we had a maxed out LP12 in the dem room and a Denon DAT recorder (this is about 1995) and did an experiment. We recorded from LP12 out to DAT at 24/96. Then played it back. It sounded exactly the same as the LP12. Same warmth and immediacy one associates with vinyl. Indistinguishable despite the LP12 being 30x the price. The same track played back via a CD sounded how you expect for digital and the relative cost of the player was also easy to hear. The conclusion was that vinyl sounds how it does because it has to. Digital sounds how it does because it (the engineer) chooses to. And matched ADC-DAC pairs (even cheap ones) can do things really expensive DACs can’t.
These days I use a solid state TEAC ADC recorder to make my vinyl available on all my systems. The playback via the ADC itself with the matched DAC always sounds identical to the deck it was recorded off. On other streamers in the house, I’d guess (speakers and room differ) it still sounds 95% like the deck it was sourced from and maybe 5% other factors like the DAC.
I’m not a big fan of the digital vinyl debate. I see a lot of false claims and assumptions on both sides. I love my streamers. I love my turntables. Different music was found for each. I don’t waste time asking which is better. They are both “good enough” to a point where any upgrade is framed like “is this new DAC better than the last DAC?” Or, “is this cartridge better than the last cartridge?” I’ve never asked myself, “does this new deck put it ahead or behind my streamer?”
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