Develop a hierarchy for phono playback

"I would like everyone to go back and carefully re-read ghdprentice's post.  I think his logic is excellent and could form the basis for consensus.  Thoughts?"

Many thoughts are already out there, and I have not changed my opinion that assigning percentages of importance to each item in the chain may make you feel good, because you can have a feeling of having achieved something, but it's worthless, because we each seek a slightly different goal and there are hundreds of ways to get there. 

Two honest men can have an honest disagreement.  A formula like this provides a useful guideline as we seek to reach our goals.  In particular it should underscore the relative importance of the often misunderstood phono stage.  I suspect that you, like I, have A - B'd expensive turntables and tonearms and can hear the subtle differences.  By comparison the difference in phono stages can be considerably greater.  And, if a top flight phono stage is in play it is ever so much easier to assess two top flight cartridges.  We each have found methodologies that suit us.  To each his own.  But to call gdhprentice's elegant solution "worthless" says more about you than you may wish you had said.  Would you care to recant?

The English language is so imprecise.  I meant it more along the lines of soften his words.  And with that said, the spirit and intent of a model of this sort is not to be rigid, it is a guideline to aid self analysis.  Think of it as a kind of a decision tree to help figuring out were you are at and what next area of focus might be most productive.  It might have more value for me than for lewm.  That is ok, but the word "worthless" especially as used to apply to one and all is very strong.   

I would think it depends upon what your goals are.

If someone was making an all out assault on the state of the art, then they would spend the majority of money on a turntable.  There's a handful of $150k plus turntables, but phono stages seem to top out around $50k.  Does anyone make a $20k plus cartridge?

If you entire system is less than $20k, then you might choose differently.  Also are you putting together a vinyl setup from scratch?  Starting from a blank slate gives the user a lot of freedom, but I think it's more common for someone to already have a vinyl system and wants to improve it somehow.  My guess is that people in this situation overspend on a cartridge.  I could be wrong.