To offer another perspective - introducing a reference quality or near reference quality component tends, in my experience, to yield one of two types of effects. Either it will expose up or downstream weaknesses in other gear, or it will let you hear virtues in your system that previously you may have missed. Once your system gets to a certain level of audio happiness I've find the latter is more often the case.
Imo given an approximate level of comparable quality across your system to start with, the components that are more likely to offer orders of magnitude improvement to the system overall (not simply old vs. new component) can be grouped as follows: group 1: TT, phonostage/linestage, and speakers; group 2: tonearm, amplifier, cartridge; group 3: everything else. Of course there are no hard and fast rules and YMMV - this is just my experience, and assumes whatever is the upgrade it is somewhat synergistic with the whole.
A reference quality component is one around which you can build a system, is likely to be less transient (you'll have it for a while), and helps you gauge the value and influence of changing other system components. Imo, one can build a system around any of the components in group 1. And, again, imo, the TT is *a* great place to start, but it is not inherently *the* best or only place to start. Swapping out a preamp/phonostage for a substantially better one can have just as dramatic - and sometimes greater - overall effect as swapping out a TT for a substantially better one. Again - this assumes that your system is relatively well balanced to start with. Cheers! Tim
Imo given an approximate level of comparable quality across your system to start with, the components that are more likely to offer orders of magnitude improvement to the system overall (not simply old vs. new component) can be grouped as follows: group 1: TT, phonostage/linestage, and speakers; group 2: tonearm, amplifier, cartridge; group 3: everything else. Of course there are no hard and fast rules and YMMV - this is just my experience, and assumes whatever is the upgrade it is somewhat synergistic with the whole.
A reference quality component is one around which you can build a system, is likely to be less transient (you'll have it for a while), and helps you gauge the value and influence of changing other system components. Imo, one can build a system around any of the components in group 1. And, again, imo, the TT is *a* great place to start, but it is not inherently *the* best or only place to start. Swapping out a preamp/phonostage for a substantially better one can have just as dramatic - and sometimes greater - overall effect as swapping out a TT for a substantially better one. Again - this assumes that your system is relatively well balanced to start with. Cheers! Tim