Best investment; cartridge or line stage?

Bang for Buck, being the most cost effective method is already in place as purchases are already made.

The cost of keeping it in use is the conundrum replace Cart' or refurbish Cart’ .

If one wants to change a device, with the intention of purchasing based on the the listening experience being the condition that matters more than just producing music. The cost to achieve a Sound that has the most attraction comes with a budget that is constrained by your own circumstances.

Great question. in general, the way I look at investing in analog: you must balance the quality of the turntable, tone arm, and cartridge with the phonostage. Typically after an upgrade my investment in tt + tone arm + cartrige = the investment in the phonostage. Your stuff looks fairly balanced at this point… maybe the cartrige look a bit light..

For much of my life the phonostage was holding back the performance of my tt. I had bought a stereophile best cheap $200 (1980) phonostage… and it sounded simply terrible. I quickly traded up and up to an AudioResearch PH 2… then upgraded over and over. It wasn’t until the PH8 that I felt it stopped getting in the way (at the time I had a VPI Aries / Van den Hull Frog $5K + $2.5K.. something like that). Now my table is around $20K and so is my phonostage. Very well matched.

I have known folks to put a $12K cartridge on a $6K tt with a $10K phonostage to great effect. Or a $12K cartridge on a $5K tt with a $3K phonostage and I was sure there was a huge amount of sound quality missing. Anyway, no hard answer, but from my experience, do not go cheap on the phonostage.

So, you are considering a new phonostage? Keeping what I said, I guess, I would do a very significant cartridge upgrade, with an eye to upgrade the phonostage at some future date.

Except the OP asked linestage vs cartridge, which seemed an odd dilemma.

@milo0812 ,

Did you mean phonostage, not linestage?

@thecarpathian phonostage.. thanks for asking clarifying question. +@lewm