We have a vinyl set-up in our mastering facility for listening to test pressings and to allow clients to bring their projects and hear the result of our work on a decent system (NA Dais, OL Illustrious, Dynavector DRT XV-1s, Soulution phono - modest by some standards, but a great sounding...
You're right - there is some objectively really bad-sounding digital out there: from older classical recordings badly digitalised, through the casualties of the loudness wars, to simply badly engineered horrors. I run an analogue mastering studio and have resorted to re-mastering favourite works...
We use a K-01 as the main DAC in our mastering room. With no upsampling and the S-DLY1 filter it is the most transparent DA I've come across for the budget - we passed up on a lot of the names (dCS, EMM) to buy it: it's essential to critical work. That said, for some pleasure listening, e.g...