Do you spend more on your cartridge or tone arm?

I wish I could afford one Lyra Atlas Lambda cartridge. I am going to use a Cardas Myrtle Heart (retipped thanks to house keeper).  

dwette, if one could experiment freely, surprises of a sort may happen, but one would have to try a lot of arm/cartridge/phono stage combinations. $15k cartridge might sound just excellent in $1k arm but it's not the point, the point is to bring out everything this cartridge is capable of and you won't be able to do it with $1k tonearm and probably with $5k tonearm either.

I don’t know. It depends on the $5K tonearm. My tonearm is $6700. I’m sure I could get more out of the Lyra with a $20K tonearm, but I assure you I am getting my money’s worth with the one I have. It's the real deal.

Like I said, it’s about balance, but generalizing on cost alone isn’t useful to me. I agree with you putting a $15k cartridge on a $1K arm isn’t optimal and poor use of funds, but that’s more extreme and not something I would consider a balanced system.

On the other end of it I see people putting $1K MM cartridges on $30K Linn LP12 Klimax turntables with $800 phono-stages and I just don’t get that.

@markalarsen 

I wish I could afford one Lyra Atlas Lambda cartridge. 

Understand. I'm not trying to rub it in or make anyone envious, but it's a reasonable part of the discussion. I got lucky with a windfall, and I have the system to take advantage of them.

Synergy of 5 almost impossible to isolate components; Cartridge, Arm, TT, Mechanical / acoustic isolation and finally the phono stage… infinite number of combinations.near anyway…

I would in the case of the OP… try to have an exchange with George Cardas… he seems like about as close to source as you might get given your choice of cartridge…

Im somewhat out of balance w a $6,700 Koetsu, $10 ish K Triplaner Ultimate, $15 K Brinkmann Bardo, $4K HRS isolation and $15K REF Phono 2SE… retail.. not what i paid….