I really cannot agree with your line of reasoning, dispie. Given the fact that one can buy excellent gear on the "pre-owned" market and that prices are all over the place depending upon age and market obsessions with certain brands over others, there is no useful point in using criteria like "Turntable and phono should be approximately equal price. Cart should be capped at about half of turntable." If you personally need such guidelines, that's fine, but you are in that case placing constraints on yourself that can cause you to miss out on some surprisingly effective combinations of gear available at very disparate price points. I regularly run a vintage cartridge for which I paid several hundred dollars on a TT/tonearm that cost me about $13,000 total, just because the match of that cartridge with that tonearm and TT is so favorable. Conversely, I sometimes run a $5K cartridge on a $600 TT in a $2500 tonearm. I guess what I am trying to say is that there is a benefit to leaving yourself open to serendipity by mixing and matching gear regardless of relative cost. That's why for me there are no rules related to cost.
