I'm new to this forum so please be easy on me. I am not new to to this hobby. I've been assembling systems for myself and friends since my high school days which was 40 years ago. I believe it is the phono stage. Speaking of high school, way back when I was an 11th grader I took a photography class taught by the high school shop teacher who happend to moonlight as a wedding photographer, R.D. Reynolds. First day of class, twenty of us are seated around our tables with our parents' SLR cameras proudly foisted in front of us. R.D. pulls out an ancient Brownie camera and says to all of us arrogant punks, "you see this old simple Brownie? Well, I am here to tell you that I can take a better photo with this here simple point and shoot Brownie than any one of you can take with those fancy SLR's you brought with you today. It is all about the skill of the photographer, not the fancy bells and whistles of the camera in the photographers hands!". Well, the same holds true for any fundamentally sound table and cartridge. Set up optimally with the skill of a pro, a humble table and cartridge can sound amazingly good IF the signal is fed into a very good phono stage. Sticking with my analogy, the phono stage would be what in the old days we photographers called an enlarger. Good ones had top knotch lenses and it was impossible to enlarge a negative into a great print without a top notch lens even though the camera lens was much less vital. Hope you don't mind my story or first post.