Any of the ECM labels recordings, Pat Metheny, John Ambercrombie, Ralph Towner, are all terrific recordings. Still finding these in the shops for reasonable prices.
Moving up the spending chain ($25 or so), Porcupine Tree remaster of In Absentia, Pink Floyds remaster of Meddle, The Genesis remaster of Selling England are amongst the better recordings, and I'm buying half speed masters just finding certain ones like those to be in the top tier. Have to mention the half speed remaster of Alan Parsons I Robot is flabberghastingly good sounding.
Brothers in Arms another goodie that can be had for cheap.
Found having access to cheap vinyl really fueled my enthusiasum for vinyl, Baltimore has record shows and several LP stores. I started with a cheap B&O turntable and now have a VPI Prime with $900 cartridge since it sounds so right and I'm getting all this new music, average 3-5 bucks tho I'll spend up to $15 for the rarer stuff and $25 - $35 for remastered re-issues or half speed masters of my favorites.
Playing vinyl thru tubes also a good move imo, my thinking is a lot of this stuff was recorded back when both the studio and home playback used tubes so it's only natural it'll sound best with tubes in the mix. I have a tube preamp and warm sounding solid state amp (Conrad Johnson).
I haven't turned on my home CD player in years, ever since the turntable went on the shelf, I have a 2K+ MusicFidelity A5 player, not a POS by any measure.
Think about a record cleaner if you'll be buying used vinyl, I like my SpinClean for initial cleaning, about $80, and hit the LP with a DiscWasher prior to playing. For stylus cleaning, the Onzow ZeroDust is the snizzle:
https://www.needledoctor.com/Onzow-Zerodust
Welcome back to the dark side.
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