Your turntable history

@dhite71 Interesting re the shims. I was also thinking about them, but hearing your experience puts that rather on the back burner. Re whether VTA *may* matter for some carts, sure, why not? For the carts I have had so far, I could not tell a difference. I hear major differences with VTF, though. I have not done any further fiddling with the Aphelion II VTF. It sounded great out of the box, so why fix what ain't broke.

At some point I also tried those test records with obstacle course. Again, very little difference if any. I tend not to listen to test-records, prefer actual music, so am ignoring test records as well. I think Steve Guttenberg is correct in saying that a great system makes an average record shine. 

@patrickalston 

All those unplayed vinyl albums laying around...can you adopt this 63 year old??

@Dwette. In my experience, it's very common for Naim owners to stick with Naim and to only upgrade within the Naim ecosystem. 

@yoyoyaya I've known plenty of Naim owners to move on to other brands.

I already upgraded from a Naim phono-stage to Boulder, from a Naim streamer to a Weiss DAC, and from Naim Fraim to HRS racks and isolation bases.

I still have a Naim 252/SCDR/300DR. The next upgrade for that would be to a 500-series system. That's in Boulder territory sound-wise and price-wise, so the Boulder will likely be my upgrade, rather than Naim.

My first TT was a Dual 1219, which i bought used.  I put a cartridge on it, I think it was a Shure M95 something.  I later upgraded to a Shure V15IIIV15 IIII.

I sold that and bought a Denon 6000 DD with a Denon arm.  The TT was a huge upgrade but I wasn't sure the arm was better than the Dual.  After living with the Denon for a few years, I was convinced the Dual arm was better. 

Later, around 1984, I sold that and bought a Micro Seiki with an outboard motor and vacuum attachment.  It now has a Micro Seiki CF-1 tonearm, a Grado tonearm, a SME 3012R tonearm and a AT-1100 tonearm.   A cartridges are, respectively, Audio Technica VM760, Grado Sonata 2, Ortofon SPU Royal, and a Hana SL MK 2.  This the best rig and I'm quite happy with it.