Should people with no turntable or reel to reel be considered audiophiles?

looscannon,

"Glupson is the type who will order the Burmester system when he gets his Porsche."

You are correct. That would be a must. Same for S Coupe. The difference is that in S you can actually hear something while driving while in 911 GTS it is a bit of a struggle. You could hear it in the Cayenne, but it is not a Porsche, apparently, so it does not matter.

Luckily for me, a Porsche is not in near future so I do not have to think too much about it.

Speaking of cars and audiophiles, another small thing. A few years ago, you could pay extra $1000-1500 (I forgot details) for Premium Harman-Kardon system in BMW. Once you read through the instructions (close to the last page, if not the last, in an on-screen manual in the car), it warned you it worked for resolutions up to 320kbps and that's it. It also warned you not to attach any storage device/hard drive to the USB port. Basically, you would pay extra for better sound that you were not supposed to use.

In reality, it worked with FLACs (any resolution), and even with MP3s of higher resolutions.

Agree with cart being most important. I’m not looking to do anything there. I have a Van Den Hul one Special that I may need to get serviced within the next year. I got a great deal on it a while back and don’t think I can come close to its sound for the expected $500 service. It’s a $1850 cartridge.

Also I have both .5 meter and 1.5 meter Kimber PBJ interconnects. Question was whether there would be any difference using the shorter one in between the Phono stage and preamp.

I know price does not always equal quality, but this cart works perfectly with the phono stage which has the load setting dialed in at 200ohms, precisely the carts recommended setting.

You can use 47k Ohm with any MC, there are many nice phono stage with optional loading, the manufacturer recommendations is not mandatory. Same with MM cartridges, 47k Ohm is not mandatory, in many cases 100k Ohm for MM is better.

Once you will try many cartridges and many different loading options you can say what is better for yourself.

I tried 3-$5k LOMC cartridges and they are no better than some $1k MM (tried many rare ones).

Regarding cables the sort one is the most important between SUT and Phono stage for example.

Balanced phono cable is another story, it’s not just about the length.

So use the .5 meter cable instead of the 1.5 M one?