Turntable versus tonearm versus cartridge: which is MOST important?

how come I always have to take the heat for dissing unipivot tonearms?

That's what we pay you for, right?

I won't waste bandwidth by quoting Ralph's post of today at 3:35 pm but it echoes what I have been trying to say in this thread. Take a well designed no frills drive like a Gem Dandy or PureFidelity (among any number of other candidates), fit it with a great arm and a $100-$250 cartridge, get it dialed in and watch the awe and amazement ensue. You CAN NOT replicate the same result with either of the other two possible combinations. And yes, there are theoretically nine total combinations so you can look at this way too-any combination that does not include an excellent tonearm is doomed. 

The 500 $ Cartridge on a 10k $ Turntable / arm combination will sound better than the expensive cartridge on a wobbly basis.

what will sound even better is a balanced system 50% turntable /tonearm, 25% cartridge and 25% phono preamplifier.

@atmasphere ,

"The cost of the cartridge has almost nothing to do with it. This all comes from the arm and how well the cartridge compliance and weight works to allow for the mechanical resonance to fall into the right frequency."

Well said.

Our human mind, as we know, is often easily overloaded and it then usually tries to simplify matters by resorting to general principles.

These can be called prejudices and more often than not they are useful when making decisions.

One such prejudice is that higher cost always equals greater performance.

However, when it comes to sonic performance I don’t see any great correlation with cost. The best I can suggest is that it seems to resemble a bell curve where beyond a certain point, performance can often start to go down.

Some might say that beyond a certain point, it has nowhere else to go!

Therefore throwing increasingly large sums of money at audio products might be the surest way to ultimate disappointment.

A bit like trading your Lexus in for ’something better’.

Turntable/tonearm/cartridge compatibility (and siting) might be one of the least understood areas in all of domestic audio.

What we do know is that resonance control matters.

What we don’t always know is how best to achieve it.

So that means sometimes we do then? Whew! What a relief!