In my opinion, you should not base your purchases on how good your total system is. You should try to buy the most of a turntable and phono stage that you are willing or able to spend. The better the front end is, the more detail and information you will pull out of your vinyl.
The better the phono stage, the better your overall experience will be.
The main issue with purchasing a phono preamp is that pretty much anything you install will most likely sound pretty good to you. The only way to truly hear the differences is to have two or three different phono stages on hand so that you can swap them out to make comparisons; if you do this, the really great phono stages will immediately jump out of the pack.
I was lucky enough to be able to do this kind of side by side comparison and the differences were dramatic. I had a Clear Audio, Gold Note PH10, Musical Surroundings Nova III, Musical Surroundings LPS, Whest Three Signature and a Whest PS.30 RDT SE 2019 with the PS.40 RDT front end/suspension chassis/Titan Pro Wire Loom/PS.40 toroid core power supply. It was shocking at how much better the two Whest phono preamps are over the group I was testing. This all started based on a friend of mine who who had told me last year that a Whest Titan Pro was the finest phono stage he had ever heard (he had one on loan for a few months); he has used many phono stages over the years.
What is important to my listening is first how quiet the electronics are. I do not like to put the system on with no material playing and hear noise or low level hum. If you have any noise, that impacts the signal to noise ratio and it muddies up things. The other things which are very important to me is how much detail the phono stage pulls out of the recording, the presence of a good detailed sound stage and the imaging. With the two Whest phono stages, I lose the speakers; its as if the speakers are not even in the room as the music surrounds me. I hear small details in the recordings the other phono stages don't present.
I suggest you spend the most you can on a phono stage as it will display information to the rest of your system. And if you'd like to read some good comparisons, You can do what I did early on; go to the Whest website and look under customer testimonials. There are hundreds of small write ups sent in from all types of users speaking of their observations of whatever model Whest they purchased against what they had been using (most of these guys had been using a lot of very expensive offerings from other manufactures). It's interesting material to read and I concur with what all of these guys are saying.
