What is the chain of importance in analog system ?

I see lots of folks with inexpensive arms using expensive moving coils and living with noise and hum which overwhelm my poor ears. I am running a $250 moving magnet cart with a $ 2000 turntable, a $1000 arm, $400 silver interconnects fed into a $2000 phono stage. On a quiet recording, the groove rush is inaudible and I hear no mistracking. I agree 100% with Dopogue.

What you guys think of:

$1500-$2000 cart, $1900-$3000 (arm+table), $3000-$5000 phono stage

Hi Nolitan,
yes, this is quite good. Personally I would save some more money and would go for a used quality cartridge. Expensive Cartridges are in general overrated. In a top System you would be amazed how good a "cheap" Lyra Dorian, Zyx 100FS (or others) can sound.

Room acoustics and speakers, regardless of whether the source is analog or digital.

Kal

Dear Nolitan: IMHO the whole subject is to understand the individual role of each analog link and its relationship between them more that the $$$$ for each one ( of course that money always is important. ) like your last post.

I agree with Syntax and Dertonarm that the most critical link is the phono stage for MM and MC cartridges. Is here in this phono stage where the cartridge signal must pass for a complex and " heavy " process to be amplified ( gain up. ) to a level that can be handle for the line stage and then to the amplifier, this is one of the important jobs of the phono stage. The other important one is that in that phono stage the cartridge signal has to be re-equalized through a inverse RIAA eq. stage to attain that the cartridge signal that goes to the line stage be with a flat frequency response.
In both of these phono stage process the cartridge signal ( always ) " suffer " a degradation ( different degradation forms: noise, distortions, colorations,etc, etc ) during the signal phono stage " manipulation " .
The main target on a phono stage is that the cartridge signal comes out with minimum lose/add whole distortions trying to preserve the cartridge signal original integrity.
But this is more easy to say that to attain that's why always is desirable to own the best quality performance phono stage we can.

In second place IMHO the tonearm/cartridge match is a crucial audio link ( together not separate or tonearm+TT like you post. ) because the same cartidge perform different in different tonearms ( everything the same. ) and we have to match the cartridge and find the tonearm that can make that the cartridge show its best quality performance.

Then the TT and tonearm internal wiring/headshell wires and tonearm IC cables as the TT/tonearm/cartridge set-up.

It is obvious that all analog links are important ( any ) and we can assess this through our each audio system experiences that when we " touch ", making tiny changes, in one analog link the whole analog quality performance change too.

As Dopogue post: +++++ " different folks, different chains. " +++++

IMHO there are and exist opinions just opinions but no absolute rules or only one " road ".

Regards and enjoy the music,
Raul.