If one is serious about the goal of having a hi fidelity, high performance, transparent system no component or part should be underestimated or given more or less importance in its contribution to the final experience you have at your listening chair.
From the cartridge to the woofer each component is interconnected to the other in a sophisticated cryptic web and chain.
In every system there must be thousands of parts and chemistry is one of many important factors.
How each of these thousands of parts, especially how one component with its thousands of parts, built by a different design circuit topoglogies/ designer , perhaps built on the otherside of the world, how it will interact with another designers design/ parts is extremely difficult to predict. An average system probably has components from more than 5 different companies and when they created their products it was within the context of their own set of contigencies, ie (room, speakers, amp, preamp, wire, cartridge, tonearm, personal tastes) and in isolation from the components you are presently using in your system.
Some people want to say the phonostage is the most important, others the speaker and so on, i say each and every single part is essential to the whole and no component should be overlooked or should be deemed more important than the other.
If you have a 10 link chain and one of the links was extremely expensive and made with state of the art metals and production processes how much will that matter when you begin using all the links to try and lift a very heavy weight when one of the links is make of a inferior metal and with inferior production? How well will the lift be executed? did it matter that the high quality component was in the chain if the weak leak was there as well?
