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!
"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?
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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…. |
@tcutter I don't believe the number of records is a relevant factor in the price of your gear, unless you own a trifling small number of records. I own fewer records than many audiophiles because I didn't like to buy an LP unless I liked at least half the record, and I'm pretty choosy. So I would tape the songs I liked from friends' records or from FM rather than buy an LP with one or two songs I liked. Consequently, I own maybe 200 rock/pop LPs, ~100 classical LPs, maybe 50 jazz LPs, and ~40 other kinds. But a high percentage of these are audiophile-quality--half-speed mastered, etc. So even though my vinyl collection is a tenth of some other members' here, I still have a $3k cartridge for my turntable, which cost about $3k 40 years ago when I bought it. I imagine many who own thousands of LPs only listen to a small fraction of those. Some collector types have trouble letting go of things (Freud would call them anal-retentive, but we don't have to go there, necessarily). I would urge those aging collectors to recognize that there is now a resurgence in vinyl sales, and so it's a good time to sell what you don't listen to. And with the current oil shortage, that will probably further worsen the quality of vinyl to be manufactured in the next few years. (I'm old enough to remember the lousy vinyl on some US records as a result of the '70s oil embargo.) Many current records are based on digital recordings/remasters anyway, so it's arguable whether it even makes sense to buy those. But if you're sitting on a bunch of all-analog vinyl that you don't listen to, why not share it with others so they can discover what good records sound like. |
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