Relative Importance of Analog Components

Thank you to all for the thoughts so far. What I was getting at (or trying to do so) was which of the four components has the most effect on final sound, which comes next and so on. It's obvious that if there is a bottleneck in sound quality ('the weakest link') then that must be addressed. But to me, a TT or a tonearm has a relatively subtle effect compared to a cartridge or a phono stage. Likewise, I can certainly hear changes when I swap phono stages, but I hear bigger changes when I swap cartridges. And what's the point of this? - very little! Maybe I'm simply justifying my choices, as I realise my expenditure on the four items has followed my ranking above!

Ah. I shall, briefly, fantasise about our two most prolix members having their own subforum, in which they can drown each other in words.

Unfortunately, this won't help clarify my question much. I'm content with my view, but I'm fascinated that other views exist, some of them ordering the parts in the exact opposite of my ranking. There really isn't a right answer, except theoretically, because the weakest link in anyone's chain will always demand attention.

😁 We're all different and I'm pretty tolerant of neurodiversity, which tends to come into play on audio forums. But even I, broad-minded as I am, don't want to look in the basements belonging to any of you. I don't even like looking in my own.

No doubt I ought not say it, but I would rather you analysed (UK English) or analyzed (American English) the thread. If you want to analize anything, please do it in your own time and in privacy with consenting adults.

But to address the meaning of your comment:

which analog audio link could damage the more the cartridge signal?

Yes, this is a valid question, but it makes a presupposition, which is that the signal from the cartridge is sacrosanct and can only be damaged downstream. I am not suggesting that signal can be improved downstream, which is nonsense. Maybe 'harm reduction' at the very best. Let us assume the TT does its best, as does the tonearm. Then the signal comes out of the cartridge as pure as it can be from those three items working at their peak. Only the phono stage can screw things up after that (yes, so can everything else downstream, but that is out of our remit here).

My suggestion is that the quality of that signal from the cartridge is the most important thing in the chain of reproduction, all other things being equal, ie you don't substitute a rotten tonearm etc.

Well I'm of the opinion that the phono stage can make more difference than the tonearm. I'm not going beyond the analog-only chain here, so pre-amp, power amp and speakers are out of consideration.

Perhaps I should have thought of a better way of phrasing my question, or maybe reduced it to two-way comparisons (TT or tonearm, cartridge or phono stage, and arranged successive comparisons until I had an aggregate answer).

The devil is in the details like "less variation between reasonably decent phono stages". Reasonably decent? If I had the means I could probably assemble a dozen $5000 phono stages and I bet you wouldn't say they were all reasonably decent - you'd quickly say which you liked the most and why. So we cannot pretend that all phono stages are so alike as to make nearly no difference. Perhaps the best way to state my position is that cartridges' sound ouputs vary more than tonearms' sound outputs vary and so on.