Pro's & con's are often the same, but different for different people.
With a vinyl rig you are 'involved' with what is going on at the start & finish of the music. That is, for the best sound you must have a clean LP & stylus. The cartridge & TA must be set/aligned correctly. But, the alignment is only needed when changing cartridges. Vinyl also takes a small bit of effort at the start of play with an anti-static brush/cleaner and stylus brush to insure all is clean. All of this is a con for some folks, but for most people who are "into vinyl" it is like putting on a seat-belt when you get in your car. Something you do and you pretty much do not even notice......... Not a big deal and many enjoy same.
For me, the biggest vinyl con is cleaning records. I have a high-end RCM (record cleaning machine), of which there are any number, but the biggest drawback is that all make noise so one cannot enjoy listening (in detail, anyway) while cleaning records. The upside, given reasonable care, it is a 'once & done' deal and LPs stay clean if handled & stored correctly.
The biggest pro for me is how much better a well set-up vinyl rig sounds compared to the same digital rig. To my ears, vinyl sounds 'real', while even the best digital rig always ends up sounding 'electronic'. I can & do listen to vinyl for hours, but can never get past about two CDs before they start to sound grating.
Another con for me is all the effort needed with other than a standard CDP where one drops in the CD and hits play. Various filters, software that must be futz'd with, downloads, looking for the streaming source, getting things to work together/interfacing, etc., etc. Many talk about the 'hassle' of cleaning LPs and then starting & stopping same. That is nothing compared to the hours one often pours into setting up and getting various bits of software driven hardware to work well together. Something I have never enjoyed and like even less these days.
A pro for digital/streaming is space. My ~1000 LPs take up about twice the space as my ~1000 CDs. With streaming the space needed for digital is much less. However, with a dedicated listening area I do not find the storage of either physical media to be a problem. And, for me, handling of same is not a problem. Plus, it would (god forbid) take a fire to do serious harm my physical media while one dead drive can wipe out thousands of files (of course, I know you have everything backed-up so that could never happen
).
For me, the cons/hassles of digital far surpass those of vinyl in getting everything to work together. Plus, with digital there is always the "next greatest thing of all time". CD, SACD, MQA, better DACs, clocks, whatever. With vinyl you may want a 'better' TT or TA or cartridge or phono-preamp, but vinyl is pretty much "set & forget" after a proper set-up and alignment.
Some state they cannot deal with the "noise" from vinyl. A properly cleaned LP & stylus are very quiet. Plus, I've yet to attend a live music event where it was truly quiet (we breath, sneeze, move, rustle papers, etc.) , so I don't expect perfectly quiet backgrounds with my recorded music. Perhaps that lack of background noise is the 'electronic' sound of digital I mentioned above.
Another pro for me with vinyl is all the excellent cartridges that are available. Both MC & MM. Excellent sound can be gotten for as little as $300 and it only gets better from there. With $10K+ cartridges available, the sky is the limit. For me, $300, $800 & $2K are pretty much the big steps in cartridge performance.
To the specifics of what vinyl rig I would suggest......... depends on your budget. I'm a DD (direct drive) TT fan, so if wishing to stay under $6K I would go with the excellent Technics SL-1200G which includes a very decent tonearm. Add in something like an Ortofon Quintet Black or Sumiko Blackbird and a Musical Surroundings Nova III. If your budget can stand the hit, the VPI HW-40 or AMG direct-drive TT/TA rigs are sublime. Then step up to something like the Ortofon Winfeld or Lyra Kleos and Parasound JC3+ phono-preamp. In either case, don't skimp on phono IC's.
Obviously, with all this, YMMV. Whatever you go with, enjoy the music.
