My Vinyl collection has a percentage of Albums bought when during my early teens and extending through to my early 20's, where owned Vinyl was a mobile medium.
Owned Albums ended up in a variety of situations and certainly met styli and TA set ups, that was not as considered as these parts are today.
There are a selection of Albums kept in the rack but not replayed, as their misuse is easy to witness when out of a sleeve, but occasionally do supply a memory jog to a past experience.
Others from this era and later purchases are being subjected to the Manual Cleaning Methodology advised in the Link.
When this cleaning method is used, the Albums coming through the process are in my words 'purified' as the end result of going through the processes.
The cleaned Albums are in my assessment, showing such qualities that I consider them able to be used with any Value of Cartridge that they may encounter, the curiosity being how much would a more expensive Cartridge reveal about the uncontaminated embedded data and the overall Cleanliness created.
My experiences of being widely exposed to Analogue Front Ends and supporting electronics, leaves me confident in my stating, it is not sensible to consider that a expensive Analogue Front End is a superior set up over a Analogue Front End that costs less. I have heard quite affordable Analogue Front Ends present in a way that is totally desirable and much more indelible as a experience, than much more expensive set ups can conjure.
An Analogue System excels and really stands out for its qualities when environmental considerations to extract the best from it are implemented. Unfortunately, this is a commonly overlooked discipline and little investigation is put into learning what is able to be achieved when working with differing configurations to meet this requirement. It is typical for one method only to be selected and lived with, where the method in use, is very poor as an interface within the space selected to be using the Analogue Front End. This should be considered as a starting point and not be a long term design.
Does it make sense to invest in very expensive Cart's, bespoke produced Vinyl Albums and expensive downstream electronics to support Vinyl Replays, when they are to be used with a TT that is not optimised for its set up as the interface created within the listening space?
The Vinyl Album is the source material, there are not any Vinyl Albums produced solely for different in monetary value Analogue Front Ends. Any Vinyl Front End can replays the Album at its best within the devices limitations to do so.
It is the accurate assessment of the limitations of the Analogue Front End, that is the most useful gauge for identifying the monies to be considered spending on the down stream supporting electronics, not whether a particular Source Material Album to be replayed, is a used VGC $10 original pressing or a limited edition $150 bespoke pressing.
It is the same for CD source material and Streamed Source material, any device selected to replay the embedded data, will replay it at its best within the devices limitations.
https://thevinylpress.com/app/uploads/2024/03/PACVR_3rd-Ed-Ch1_2024-03.pdf
As always made known, there are set ups quite capable of producing music and the result is very contented listeners, learning about other options for the set up, can only bring better impressions about the End Sound being presented.
Optimisation of a set up does not mean enjoyment is removed. The optimisation means the investments made are being exposed to set up conditions for the overall function that are the most valuable interfaces and the overall set up delivers at clise to its best. The listener becomes much more attracted to such a condition being put in place, and it is only the listener that can put in the work to create the optimisation.