Relative Importance of Analog Components
We see people struggling with what to upgrade next, or where to direct their attention if everything seems to be working fairly well. I'm probably a bit more inclined to give more importance to sources and less to speakers than most people, but in general I like to look at which component is the 'rate-limiting factor' which one holds back the rest and then concentrate on improving that.
But to look specifically at vinyl reproduction, I have the strong impression that out of the four main components, they can be ordered in importance of potential effect on sound like this:
Cartridge
Phono stage
Tonearm
Turntable
I'm sure other people would list those four in a different order. How would you rank them and why?
I can’t rank them as the weakest link would glare IMO. Great cartridge is huge but has to have a great arm to perform at its best. Then the phono stage has to be up to par with the arm/cart. Until I upgraded my tonearm to a basis vector 4 I thought the same thing as Russ above. But man what a difference it made to my presentation it was jaw dropping compared to other upgrades I have made. After all the arm just gives the cartridge a ride, right? Man is that ever an understatement.
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Thank you to all for the thoughts so far. What I was getting at (or trying to do so) was which of the four components has the most effect on final sound, which comes next and so on. It's obvious that if there is a bottleneck in sound quality ('the weakest link') then that must be addressed. But to me, a TT or a tonearm has a relatively subtle effect compared to a cartridge or a phono stage. Likewise, I can certainly hear changes when I swap phono stages, but I hear bigger changes when I swap cartridges. And what's the point of this? - very little! Maybe I'm simply justifying my choices, as I realise my expenditure on the four items has followed my ranking above! |
Dear @dogberry : " which of the four components has the most effect on final sound... " It's obvious that a change in the transducer ( cartridge/speaker ) has " the most effect " but what I posted is more about quality level more than just sounds different.
You can have 2 same model cartridges that will sounds alike when in reality no two same model cartridges sounds exactly the same, always exist very tiny differences and be differences thaT YOU ONLY CAN BE AWARE AND DISCERN ON IT IF YOU OWN THE " RIGTH " HIGH RESOLUTION PHONO STAGE AND THE MATCHED TONEARM and even if you own those two audio items maybe you can't discern about because sometimes we need to know what to look for, this is that we must have a test whole proved proccesss. The cartridge signal quality level depends ( everything the same ) directly/mainly by the Phono Stage and tonearm quality design levels. No matters what.
Discern between different and better depends of each one of us MUSIC/sound experience.
R. |
