Where a vinyl system's money actually goes: spending in the right order

A bloke came into the old Fitzroy shop with a $6,000 turntable and a $40 stylus alignment gauge from a cereal box, near enough. He'd spent everything on the plinth and the arm and had nothing left for the cartridge, let alone getting it set up properly. That's the story of most vinyl systems I've seen walk through a door, and honestly, it's the story of a lot of the systems I've built for myself over the years too. You spend where the excitement is, not where the sound actually comes from.

I want to talk about spending order today, because nobody explains it properly. Everyone will tell you what to buy. Almost nobody tells you what to buy first, and why the sequence matters more than the total you spend.

The cartridge and setup budget almost nobody protects

Here's the thing that took me embarrassingly long to learn behind the counter: the cartridge and its setup account for more of what you actually hear than almost anything else in the chain, and it's the line item people cut first when the budget's tight. Tracking force, azimuth, VTA, anti-skate — these aren't audiophile theatre, they're the difference between a cartridge tracking cleanly and one smearing detail on every inner groove.

I'd rather sell someone a $250 cartridge set up dead right than a $600 one bolted on at whatever angle the arm happened to land at. That's not false modesty about the more expensive option — it's just what I watched happen, repeatedly, across a decade of customers bringing records back saying the top end sounded harsh. Nine times out of ten it wasn't the cartridge. It was tracking force half a gram out, or anti-skate set by feel instead of a test record.

Budget for a proper setup — whether that's your own time with a decent protractor and a digital scale, or a tech doing it — before you budget for the next tier of cartridge. This is the step with the worst consequences for being skipped and the least glamour for being done right, which is exactly why it gets skipped.

Phono stage: where the diminishing returns start early

I've written elsewhere on this site about how much you actually need to spend on a phono stage budget, so I won't repeat the whole argument, but the short version bears saying again here because it's central to spending order: a mid-priced standalone phono stage will outperform almost every built-in phono input on an integrated amp, and the jump from a genuinely bad phono stage to a competent one is one of the biggest single upgrades available in a vinyl chain, dollar for dollar.

Past that first jump, though, the returns flatten fast. Going from a decent phono stage to a very expensive one buys you a smaller improvement than going from bad to decent did — and that's the pattern you'll see at almost every stage of this list. The first sensible spend in any category does the heavy lifting. The second and third dollar in the same category does less each time.

Amplification: separates versus integrated, and when it's worth the jump

I run valves because I like the ritual and I like what they do to vinyl specifically — there's a warmth and a way they handle harmonic decay that measures worse and sounds, to my ears, better on records that were mixed and mastered in an era that expected some tube colouration downstream. Marcus would tell you the distortion figures don't lie, and he's right, they don't. I just don't think the distortion figures are the whole story for how a system makes you feel about a record you've heard four hundred times.

For most people building a first serious system, though, a good solid-state integrated amp is the sensible move, and there are some genuinely excellent ones at sane prices right now — the Rega Brio Mk7 (check price) and Cambridge Audio CXA81 MkII (check price) both do more than their price suggests, and if you want streaming built in as well the Naim Uniti Atom (check price) or Marantz Model 40n (check price) cover a lot of ground in one box. We've got a fuller rundown of that territory in our guide to the best streaming amplifiers and all-in-one systems.

The question of exactly when the jump from a mid amp to a genuinely high-end one pays off — and when it's your speakers holding you back instead — is worth its own read; we've covered it properly in when to upgrade your amplifier versus your speakers. My short answer, having sat with this for years: don't spend big on amplification until your cartridge and phono stage are sorted, because a better amp just amplifies the flaws in your front end more accurately.

Speakers: the part where room and format decide more than price

This is where I'll disagree, mildly, with the instinct a lot of new hi-fi buyers have, which is to chase floorstanders because they look like "real" hi-fi. In a lot of Melbourne terraces and apartments — small rooms, hard walls, a lounge that's also the dining room — a good standmount on proper stands will give you tighter, more coherent bass than a floorstander that's overloading the room with low-frequency energy it can't control. I sold plenty of both over the years, and the standmount was the right recommendation more often than the floorstander crowd would like to admit.

Something like the KEF LS50 Meta (check price) or the Bowers & Wilkins 705 S3 (check price) on decent stands will outperform a same-priced floorstander in a room under about four by four metres, most of the time. We go into this properly in speaker format by room, and separately in standmount speakers on the wrong stands — because buying the right speaker and then putting it on a wobbly $80 stand from a hardware chain undoes a decent chunk of what you paid for.

If your room's bigger, or you genuinely want the extension a floorstander like the Focal Kanta No.2 (check price) gives you, that's a legitimate call — I'm not anti-floorstander, I'm anti buying the wrong format because it looks more serious in the lounge room.

Cables: the category where the money actually stops making sense

I'll say this plainly because I think most of the industry won't: past a certain point — a well-shielded phono cable and a reasonable pair of interconnects and speaker cables from a proper manufacturer — you are spending money on confidence, not sound. I've had this argument with customers who swore black and blue that a $400 upgrade cable transformed their system, and I believe they heard something change. I just don't believe it was worth $400 compared to what that money does spent on a cartridge upgrade or room treatment instead.

We've laid out where that line sits in more technical detail in cable and interconnect upgrades. My rule of thumb, from behind the counter: if a customer's cable budget was heading past 5–8% of the total system cost, I'd usually try to steer them back toward the turntable, the cartridge, or the phono stage instead. That's not a hard science; it's a decade of watching where the actual improvements landed versus where people wanted them to land.

Turntable, plinth and isolation: spend here, but not first

A good plinth and platter, properly isolated from footfall and speaker vibration, matters — a cartridge tracking a groove on a table that's picking up structural vibration from your own speakers is fighting a losing battle no matter how well you've set it up. But I'd still put this after cartridge setup and phono stage in the spending order, because a mediocre table with a well-matched, well-set-up cartridge and a decent phono stage will usually beat an expensive table with a badly matched cartridge feeding a cheap phono input.

If you're building from nothing, something like the Rega Planar 3 (check price) remains a genuinely sensible base — it's not the most exciting turntable in a room, but it's engineered by people who understand exactly which corners can be cut and which can't, and that discipline shows up in how it actually performs. There's a broader walkthrough of the whole front-end build in how to build a vinyl front end if you want the fuller version of this argument.

Where I've made the wrong call myself

I'll admit I got this one wrong for years: I sat on a cheap phono stage for way too long because I'd convinced myself the cartridge upgrade would fix what I was hearing. It didn't. When I finally swapped the phono stage, the improvement was bigger than three cartridge upgrades combined had been. I still think about that every time someone tells me they're saving up for a better cartridge before they've sorted their phono stage — I try to gently redirect them, because I've paid that tuition already so they don't have to.

The system-building instinct that serves you best, in my experience, is to spend on the thing closest to the stylus first, and work outward — setup, cartridge, phono stage, amplification, speakers, room, and only then cables and cosmetics. It's not a thrilling order. The cartridge alignment gauge isn't going to impress anyone who comes over for a listen. But it's the order that actually correlates with what comes out of the speakers, and after ten years of watching customers spend in the wrong sequence and wonder why the upgrade didn't land, I trust it more than I trust the excitement of a big-ticket purchase.

None of this is really about being frugal, by the way. Some of the customers I remember most fondly spent plenty of money — they just spent it in the right order, and got a system that sounded like the investment. That's the whole game.