Turntable prices. Is my mind going?

OK.

Mahgister, Perhaps I misunderstand you but your agenda seems to be that one can make cheap gear sound as good as or better than very expensive gear, if one is possessed of a certain wisdom regarding room acoustics and other more superficial tweaks. I think one needs to have both kinds of skill, the skill to spend money (what exactly is worth the expenditure and what is not) and the skill to modify the room and judiciously apply a few tweaks (perhaps) to maximize the listening experience, which in the end is always going to be judged subjectively. But you also cannot turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

At least you admit that you "don't know". That's a good place to start, rather than to think that if it's cheaper, it must be as good or better. as some do.  There's a great line from the movie "A Thousand Clowns", which came out in the early 60s and is one of my favorites.  Martin Balsam plays financially successful older brother to Jason Robards who plays a sort of devil-may-care beatnik type who is financially careless at best. (There were Beatniks in the 50s and early 60s.)  The two brothers are having an argument about life philosophies, and Martin Balsam says to Jason Robards, with irony, "I get it. If I'm so smart, why aren't I poor?"  The take home lesson for audiophiles being sometimes there is a correlation between cost and quality, but not all the time.

Post 1974 911s were awful and slow due to US emissions controls. Mid to late 80s SC models were ok but certainly not very fast. The 964 finally recapitulated the great late 60s/early 70s cars.

Since an order of magnitude is 10, I don't think there were any turntables in commercial existence for more than maybe one order of magnitude greater cost than the original ARXA (which would have been $670); was there a $6700 tt back then?  Anyway, this thread is BORRRRRINGGGGG!!!  Should be deleted for snooze factor, not to mention pusillanimity (if that is a word for "small-mindedness").

Bill Gates is one of the great philanthropists of our lifetimes. So, give the guy a break on the cost of his audio system, as if any of us knew what that was.

For $5K or less you can have 95% of the performance of those hyper-expensive behemoths.  And I am not sure you would ever hear the 5% difference.