I’m coming into this area as a practical and philosophical result of:
- me wanting to own my music
- CDs are barely being made
2.1. If they are - they’re not being shipped to my corner of the world - Torrenting often failed me in terms of variety.
However - I am absolutely ignorant about equipment, maintainance, and know-hows of the audiophile world.


Those aren’t really sufficient reasons to deal with vinyl IMHO. Do it because you want another weird expensive hobby maybe, or because there’s music you like that you can’t easily get in other formats. Or you like full sized album art, etc. Otherwise in practical terms it’s mostly not worth it, IMHO.
I was into it back in the day. But I found when I bought a new LP, I’d usually dub it to tape cassette on the first listen. After that I’d usually play the tape instead of the LP just because it was less hassle.
These days just rip everything to FLAC and transcode that to other formats as the need arises. It’s on your HDD so you still own it. Make backups of course.