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"You spent how much on that cartridge?"

Should there be a ratio of the amount of vinyl to the cost of your playback system? A recent thread implied that you should not have a nice rig unless you own a lot of albums. Almost like one does not qualify.

I want to enjoy listening to the relative-to-some few that I own without compromising. I agree that if you have little to no familiarity with the format, you should enter gingerly. But once you've decided you like it, why accept mediocrity?

 

 

tcutter
parkergetdean
1,124 posts
 

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!

inna
8,240 posts
 

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.

lloydc's avatar
lloydc
779 posts
 

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.

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
2,455 posts
 

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". 

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