Largest Impact - Arm or Cart?

A great tonearm with an average cartridge will outperform an average tonearm with a great cartridge all day long.

This is spot-on advice. Listening to a great cartridge on a average arm you may never hear all the cartridge can deliver. And you might be surprised at just how good a mid-price cartridge will sound on a better arm. And yes, you may need a little more money to get there.

I've not lived with an Origin Encounter arm so I don't know how easily it lets you adjust SRA/VTA, azimuth, VTF, and anti-skate. The higher-up the cartridge chain you go the more critical it becomes to optimize cartridge setup in order to get all you're paying for. One criteria of a good tonearm is that it accomodates fine grained adjustment and you are comfortable using it. Do you feel you're getting the most from your Benz M2? If you are not satisfied that it is set up near perfect, try to get it there.

I'd ask other owners of your same table what arms they are using. You might also ask someone (a dealer?) who has a better arm and/or table to install your cartridge in his system to hear the difference that upgrades in those areas can make with the M2. You might be surprised its a better cartridge than you think.

your 'encounter' is an excellent arm, and a bargain given the money it would take just to hear an ever-so-slight improvement. for 1k however, there are lots of cartridges that will shake up your system in a bigger way.....sometimes blowing the money on new music will make the need to change components go away.

I agree with Jaybo. You already have a $2,000 arm, and Origins are generally considered over-achievers anyway. If you have $1K you *must* spend, I'd say get a nice cartridge. You wouldn't be stretching beyond the Encounter's capabilities by any means.

But if you want to make big tonearm improvements, save your money until you can get a Graham Phantom.

Assuming you sell the M2 (retails around $1300) for $500 and add the pocket burning $1000, you're basically back to the cost of the M2.

Contrary to the other recommendations, you'll need to drop over $1500 plus the proceeds of the M2 to make a significant upgrade which would be the likes of a Zyx Airy 2, Zyx Airy 3, Sumiko Celebration, Lyra Helikon, etc.

The Encounter is hardly an overachiever and sells for $1600+ not $2000.

Check out this thread, in support of the validity of following the turntable upgrade hierarchy ('table, then arm, then cartridge):

Palasr, Salectric, and Doug Deacon were commenting on how good the Denon DL 103R is in the context of riding on a good turntable / tonearm. I think this is worth reviewing.

The relevant comments start at post #31:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?eanlg&1171736594&openfrom&31&4#31

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier