Tru blu, I think the "unworldly" part of the Macintosh unit in the vinyl store is simply the phono section of the preamplifier - plus, perhaps, what's feeding it in the way of turntable, arm, and especially cartridge. You may have discovered what lots of us know: that, at equivalent dollar levels above mass-market basic (as if there still were such a thing for vinyl), analogue from vinyl simply beats digital from CDs in musical sound quality. I invite the skeptics reading this to compare the same current recording on the two media (hard to find, but there are examples), played back under the same conditions through the same system (after the different inputs of course), and let us all know the result.