"You spent how much on that cartridge?"

Let's not underestimate the value (monetary and sonically) of a good tonearm. No point putting an expensive cart on a cheap tonearm. It will not sound much better. It could even sound worse because of the mismatch.

I think it’s funny that people want to opine on such qualitative matters such as how much you should spend on a cart or how many albums one should own or what percentage of the total system spend should be on a certain component. Guidelines are great, but beyond that you do you! If you have 1 album and a $30k vinyl system and you have the money and enjoy it that is awesome. If you have 5,000 albums and a suitcase player you like listening to on your Ford F150 tailgate go for it!  

tcutter-

by the looks of your room/graphs, you did your homework-bravo.

Great to see the ol VPI doin its thing. 

Obvious you have the means to acquire a newer spinner, but I get it.

With the arm/speed management and cart system I'm sure it's not that far off from something more costly.👍

To be fair a modern SOTA vs a fully depreciated Sapphire or say a Denon 75/80/3000 is not a fair economic fight… but I’ve done and still do the same sonic value experiment and trade off.,  see my North system w constrained layer 2 arm 75 on HRS isolation w Ortofon / Triplaner / Dynavector arms and carts from Dyna / Denon / Grace / Kuzma and Koetsu…

it is all great ratio fun….

One of these days a Koetsu stone body… for sure…