The Rega Planar 2

It's easy to imagine I had no record collection and only listened to pirated cassettes but in fact I had a healthy record collection long in to the CD age.
I reasoned that if I was going to buy records I might as well try and use the best possible equipment. The Linn Sondek was out of my reach but the Rega Planar 2, with its glass platter was reasonable and coupled with an Ortofon VMS30E Mk II stylus (no bamboo here....) was very, very good.

The amplifier was a source switch and the closest I could afford to a "piece of wire with Gain" but the KEF Celeste II speakers helped, and for 20 years no improvements were needed.

Of course CDs arrived and I'm sorry, but they're just better than vinyl and cassettes. No crackle, no rumble, no hiss, a much lower noise floor and on an A/B blind test using my favourite source material "Crime of the Century" by Supertramp the CD version was noticeably better, both on speakers and on Sennheiser headphones (that damaged my hearing over the years, but that's another story...).

The current retro-vogue for vinyl, even cassettes is just daft: I can get the whole Tidal lossless FLAC-encoded bitstream thing but vinyl, really? It doesn't sound better, what you're hearing is the mechanical bits getting in the way of the orginal master tape. And buying new vinyl is even sillier: they're copies of the CD masters, so you're really not winning anything at all.
One of the issues with vinyl pressings is that much beyond about 20 minutes per side the modulation of the grooves has to be reduced or you run out of vinyl before the end. There was a certain studio magic about how the balance between decent amounts of modulation (more modulation = higher volume above the noise floor) was achieved during the master pressing and master pressers became celebrities by signing the inner groove. One particular maestro was George Peckham, a colleague of The Beatles who became famous for signing his Master pressings "A Porky Prime Cut" and worked for many of the record labels between the 1960s and the 1990s. All of this analogue wizardry has of course long since disappeared in to the digital dustbin, CDs had no such limitation.

The Rega lingered long in to the CD age but once I'd bought (reluctantly) all my records again on CD and finally ditched the tapes and ripped the CDs the loft needed emptying and I sold it to a man in Sweden who paid more than I bought it for (mind you I had the original box and instructions). Now that represents value for money.