Do you spend more on your cartridge or tone arm?

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.

A lot of guys are operating under the principle that vinyl playback is like a math or computer optimization problem - there is some objective, absolute "best" result to be had, and once setup has been mastered, it’s generally to be attained by throwing more expensive hardware at the problem. This is where "weakest link" theories find favor.

But past a certain point, I think it starts to be like an ice cream parlor. What combination of base flavor(s) and toppings do you like best? Cone or bowl? Dipped or nah? I’ve liked most combinations, but loved few (huh, maybe it’s more like girls). If someone else doesn’t like your favorite sundae - who cares.

If top-level cartidges were converging towards a similar kind of sound, I’d believe it was more the former than the latter. But they don’t, not really.

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…

@tomic601  Yep, this too - synergy is key!!