"You spent how much on that cartridge?"

Fascinating subject.  I am thinking about my VPI HW19 MKIII, bought new in 1986, but now fitted with an SME 3009 Series II Improved, which is even older.  Oh well, I am playing mostly old records anyway.  Having a lot of fun too.  As I sort thru these records and enter them into the Discogs database most of them aren't worth much either.  Maybe I should hang my head in shame.  I am also mostly using MM cartridges too.  Not much to brag about.

a formula is not a bad thing when upgrading and you are a beginner.

Luckily I never had the budget to have to limit my upgrade by a formula, I always went all out and spent 100s of dollars!

I am not a cartridge man but I suppose different music can sound best with different cartridges. 30 would be too many for me but five might not.

I had this kind of experience with RCA cables when I had solid state phono stage. Now with VAC's onboard MM phono stage I don't need additional cables at all. Nottingham Space Arm's wiring goes straight into the amp.

Does it make sense to put a $15K cartridge on a $2k turntable? I haven’t heard of anyone who has tried that.  The other way around, vice-versa, in reverse, might be better.  Unless that’s backwards.

Does it make sense to put a $15K cartridge on a $2k turntable? I haven’t heard of anyone who has tried that.  The other way around, vice-versa, in reverse, might be better.  Unless that’s backwards.

A Koetsu Platinum stone on a vintage 1980s SOTA Star w/ FR64fx arm sounds amazing. That's not exactly 2K / 15K but it's close. I've done the reverse too: $2K-ish cart on 15K or 30K table, and it was great too but I'll take the old SOTA / Koetsu in those instances. You can do this equation a million different ways with other makes & models, and observe great variance in the results. As I was taught early on in Computer Science at GA Tech in the 1990s - the answer is always: "it depends".